online marketing hong kong

Rapidshare Zen Cart Template - Cosmetic Corner

2009-09-30T00:53:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tag: rapidshare,zencart,template,download

ZenCart Template
Product Name: ZenCart Cosmetic Corner
Type: Fashion & Beauty
Script Size: 4.25 MB
DESCRIPTION
Make-up needs for beautification on a daily basis.

INCLUDED MATERIALS

Ready to use Theme

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Photoshop PSD Source Files

Standard HTML Version

External CSS Style Sheet

Download:

http://rapidshare.com/files/163831363/zc_ccorner.zip

Magento Official Documentation for Developers V1.0

2009-09-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

Technorati Tag: magento vs oscommerce vs zen cart,official,documentation,developer,open source,shopping cart

We were among a few of the studios to receive the early release of the Magento documentation before it’s official release date.

We broke the embargo ’cause we just didn’t have the heart to keep it to our selves, we all now how painful it is to work without it.

So finally, what we’ve all been waiting for:

It contains class references, samples, documentation and tools utilizing the APIs required to develop with Magento.
It also explains how to set up real debug environment which will help you greatly.
The package contains over 1 million words of documentation and nearly 1000 samples of code.

We just scratched the surface but we can already say it’s awesome. Enjoy!

Download mirror 1
Download mirror 2

Magento User Guide: Get Your Web Store Up and Running on the Platform for Growth

2009-09-29T01:06:00.000-07:00

Technorati Tag: magento vs oscommerce vs zen cart,user experience,store,online,shopping cart,open source,rapidshare

Magento_User_Guide.zip | 4.24 MB

Master the basics of running your Magento store using hands-on tutorials by Varien, the Magento company

The Magento User Guide provides the site administrator with detailed instructions addressing the platform's innumerable functions. From setting up your store to managing your products, pages and promotions to generating detailed reports, our User Guide empowers our ever-widening customer to utilize the platform for all of its vast capacity. Serving as a handy problem solving solution as well as a practical step by step guide, our User Guide is sure to become a cost-effective partner in your Magento store implementation.

Quote:

http://rapidshare.com/files/240999670/Magento_User_Guide.zip
http://depositfiles.com/files/y71ln0cxz
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G6HT3B2V
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G6HT3B2V
http://mirrorvip.com/files/0JNYMXJZ/Magento_User_Guide.zip

Video Tutorial Building an Online Shopping Cart Rapidshare Download

2009-09-28T00:45:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tag: video,tutorial,online,shopping cart,rapidshare,ecommerce,payment,integraton,security

By 2007, 77% of internet users over the age of 13 — about 131.3 million people — will shop online.

In these tutorials, instructor Lawrence Cramer helps give business owners the tools to harness this market effectively. Using an in-depth case study and other varied examples, Lawrence demonstrates how to seamlessly create and incorporate a shopping cart and back end to support online customers.

Building an Online Shopping Cart covers everything from the general concepts of e-commerce to the nitty-gritty of setting up and customizing credit card and order processing features.

The training also covers security, customer privacy, building a store, and developing and integrating customer service and policies.

Download from Rapidshare:

http://rapidshare.com/files/229290962/Lynda.com_20Building_20an_20Online_20Shopping_20Cart.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/229291129/Lynda.com_20Building_20an_20Online_20Shopping_20Cart.part1.rar

Rapidshare Video Download: Shopping Cart & Paypal From Scratch

2009-09-27T23:27:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tag: opencart vs. magento,oscommerce,opencart plugins,opencart vs zencart,prestashop vs zen cart,opencart vs magento,magento vs oscommerce vs zen cart,cj affiliates,google checkout opencart,oscommerce vs opencart,easy populate magento,opencart google checkout,opencart innodb

Shopping Cart & Paypal From Scratch
Price $14.95 Level: Beginner
9 Lessons 5 hours
Video 900 x 700 Video Format

You could offer this cart to clients or start your own little shop and start making some extra income. People trust Paypal and learning how to work with it can only benefit you and your clients.

Topics
Session based Shopping Cart, Checkout form, Passing our cart to Paypal, Collecting transaction details from Paypal and storing them in MySQL and displaying them, Paypal Developer Site, Instant Payment Notification, Personlised thank you page and heaps more!

What is the end result?
By the end of the lessons you'll have created a MySQL and PHP driven Shopping Cart that handles Paypal transactions and s orders in your very own shipping system from scratch

Lessons
The source code is saved at the end of each lesson, It comes with the videos.
* Lesson 01 - Introduction
* Lesson 02 - PHP to MySql
* Lesson 03 - Layouts, views, templates
* Lesson 04 - Setting up the Shopping cart
* Lesson 05 - Checkout baby yeah!
* Lesson 06 - Sending our cart to Paypal
* Lesson 07 - Paypal Instant Payment Notification
* Lesson 08 - Admin and Thank you page
* Lesson 09 - Pretty Template and Phone Call

Rapidshare Download Links:

http://rapidshare.com/files/268283229/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/268284089/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/268283424/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/268283822/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/268284042/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/268283186/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/268283852/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part7.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/268283249/PHP_Video_Tutorials_Shopping_Cart_and_Paypal_From_Scratch.part8.ra

Ebook Download: "Choosing an Open Source CMS: Beginner's Guide" by Nirav Mehta

2009-09-27T23:19:00.001-07:00

Find the best CMS and start working with it to create web sites, blogs, communities, e-commerce sites, and intranets.
Understand different types of CMSs and select the one that best fits your needs.
Install and customize a CMS with themes and plug-ins.
Learn key concepts of Content Management Systems and how to systematically assess your requirements.
Introduction to the major CMSs including Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, Plone, Magento, Alfresco, and more.
A hands-on, easy-to-read guide that gives you practical tips on hosting, project management, working with specialists and communities, and finding experts.

Download link:
http://rapidshare.com/files/250220159/978_1_847196_22_4.rar
Or
http://hotfile.com/dl/7801816/cf8d3e4/978_1_847196_22_4.rar.html
Or
http://uploading.com/files/L50C9LUO/978_1_847196_22_4.rar.html

Wordpress shopping Cart Plugin

2009-09-27T22:38:00.001-07:00

delicious tags: opencart vs. magento, oscommerce, opencart plugins, opencart vs zencart, prestashop vs zen cart, opencart vs magento, magento vs oscommerce vs zen cart, cj affiliates, google checkout opencart, oscommerce vs opencart, easy populate magento, opencart google checkout, opencart innodb

The WordPress Shopping Cart plugin gives you the ability to quickly and seamlessly integrate an online shop with a fully functional shopping cart interface into any Wordpress website.

With the easy to use interface, you can set up your multiple products and categorize/organize them into multiple product categories. Add additional images to showcase your products so that users know what they are buying and add digital downloads to products if needed so that users can securely download paid files from your website.

Multiple payment methods, including PayPal, 2CheckOut and MoneyBookers give your users the ability to choose how they would like to pay and process their payments without any fuss at all. In just a few minutes with a few clicks, your users will be back at your site with a completed order.

Take your WordPress e-Commerce to the new level the easy way! Below are all the main attractions/features for the WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin. These are not the only features but simply the highlighted ones.

* Product Categories

* Multiple Products

* Digital Downloads

* Additional Product Images

* Product Styles/Swatches

* Discount Coupon Codes

* Pricing Tiers/Levels

* Minimum Order Setting

* WP Post/Page Embedding

* Multiple Payment Methods

* Ajax Powered Features

* Custom Dynamic Fields

* Product Suppliers

* Buy Now Mode

* Content Tabs

Download :

http://depositfiles.com/files/a86nf89v4

http://hotfile.com/dl/13586697/f4450cf/Wps...Plugin.rar.html

Magento: Beginner's Guide eBook download

2009-09-14T04:33:00.001-07:00

Product Description:
Create a dynamic, fully featured, online store with the most powerful open source e-commerce software step-by-step guide to building your own online store
Focuses on the key features of Magento that you must know to get your store up and running
Customize the store's appearance to make it uniquely yours
Clearly illustrated with screenshots and a working example
Product Details:
Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: Packt Publishing (April 15, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847195946
ISBN-13: 978-1847195944

Download Link:

http://www.file-rack.com/files/hotAo3Q2rbmq/1847195946.rar.html

Blog Summary of Autoblogged and its Competitors

2009-09-03T19:46:00.001-07:00

AutoBlogged itself is a powerful blogging plugin for WordPress that automatically creates blog posts from RSS or Atom.
Auto Blogging is a great way to automate your wordpress posts to win your efforts to focus on the money with your blog. With dozens of features AutoBlogged has a plug-in autoblog most powerful software WordPress and the best way to blog content automatically.

Here are some topics about Autoblogged and its competitors, named, WPMixer, CC Caffeinated Content:

WordPress AutoBlog Plugin: Automatically generate blog posts from …

Wordpress Autoblog plugin: Caffeinated Content

WPMixer – A Sophisticated Wordpress Autoblog Plugin Designed for Autoblogging

Wordpress Autoblogging Paid Plugin Review: Autoblogged, CC, WPmixer

Autoblogged or WPmixer: Which One to Choose for Wordpress Autoblogging

Create Your First E-commerce Website: an Ebook worths to Read and Follow

2009-09-01T22:43:00.001-07:00

Having been introducing and reviewing those prevailing open source ecommerce programs, such as oscommerce, zen cart, prestashop, magento, etc. here is a post about Create Your First E-commerce Website, an Ebook which has all the strategies that must constantly create Internet presence of that your company is a major player both locally and globally.

Want immune from economic recession? Need money pure and simple; money for medical expenses?

Here's an online version but great simple way to improve your knowledge of the customer for you, so always buy your business and only your company again and again!

Setting online business, you will be recession proof! Statistics show that also grows with the recent economic slowdown, the share of the online volume of transactions in the global case.

There are many reasons for this -

* People are no longer afraid of online transactions

* People find shopping on the internet to be faster

* People find more information about the product online

* People associate online buying with cheaper prices

* People are more likely to take advantage of specials and offers

* Views of products have improved

* Online delivery methods have improved

Think about starting a business, the products sold online, but have not done? If you have already implemented an enterprise portal, but does not take much to do except act as a map of the company online fantasy? It is time to put the latest business strategies and business technology work for you!

Download:
Ziddu

This site does not store files server. We only index and link with the content provided by other sites.

Earning From Online Internet Marketing by Open Source Magento, Oscommerce, Virtuemart, Zen cart, Prestashop

2009-07-13T17:24:00.001-07:00

delicious tags: make money online, ebay, seo, hong kong, online marketing, ppc, making money online, social media, top earning, drop ship, affiliate program, blog, shopping cart, behavioural marketing, media measurement, anayltics, drop shippings, services

There are many open source ecommerce solution are available in the market which is easy to use and user friendly. Top name for such open source are Magento Commerce, OsCommerce, Virtue mart, Zen cart, Prestashop and many more. Each open source has their own uniqueness in the market, some have rich functionality features, some has template based designing structure or some have user friendly nature.

Open source ecommerce website solutions can be used to develop ecommerce solutions for different requirements. One can get customized services from his ecommerce solution provider that best suit his online business requirements.

In order to get the maximum benefit out from online business the website needs to consider few most critical concepts.

First is effective products services and second one is secured payment methods and most importantly outstanding customer communication and support. Products as well as services can be presented and sold on an e commerce websites.

Ecommerce website development works well for both B2B and B2C websites, and greatly increase profit margins. These online options enable rapid business construction, and allows for feedback about the number of visitors coming to an online store.

It facilitates in keeping and maintaining proper records in a database. The use of graphic, flash, multimedia gives real shopping experience to the customers. Make sure which ever elements one use for the e commerce website design do not take much time to download. If downloads of e commerce website is not faster then customer may loose interest and switch to another website. E commerce websites are efficient and paperless medium for many business transactions.

In summary, Internet sales will continue to soar every year. It is now more important than ever to have a professional, well designed and easy to follow ecommerce website if you are wishing to earn from online internet market.

Five Steps to Use Social Networks Effectively

2009-07-09T18:49:00.001-07:00

Social networks can be a great addition to our marketing toolboxes.
But social networks can also be great time-wasters, too. Here are some tips for using social networks as effective marketing tools.

1. Join the active networks. There are literally thousands of social networks to choose from (digFoot lists over 3,700). But it makes sense to focus on just three.

    * LinkedIn. Often described as “Facebook for business,” LinkedIn combines a very large user base, excellent tools for finding connections, and lively discussion groups.
    * Facebook. The growth of this network is phenomenal — it’s claiming 700,000 new users every day! Even six months ago, most of my Facebook friends were under 30. Facebook is still a much more informal place than LinkedIn, but it’s becoming a valuable business tool as Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups (see below) evolve.
    * Twitter. Technically, Twitter isn’t a social network, but it can be great for business communication and networking with customers, colleagues and friends. Facebook is highlighting its status update functionality to make it more “Twitterish,” so we’ll see how the two services compete.

2. Create pages for your business on LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter.

3. Join groups within the social networks where people you know are likely to hang out. Increase your credibility and visibility by using your professional expertise to add to these discussions.

4. Post frequently, but judiciously. Meryl’s comments about Twitter overload applies to the social networks as well. I’ll also add that services allowing one to post simultaneously to multiple networks, such as Ping.fm, are great, but should be used carefully.

4. Use the networks’ automated tools and other related automation tools to help you. Here I present two of them:

Twitter Traffic Machine - The Automated Growth & Money Making System.This System Explains How To Grow A Twitter Account Rapidly W/total Automation Via 5 Videos.

Social Bookmarking Software, Social Bookmarking Tool. The best social bookmarking tool. Social bookmarking software to major social bookmarking sites and unlimited sites with scuttlescript support.

The recommendations presented to you are worth the time to learn and use so as to generate targeted traffic for your businesses.

5. Use RSS feeds to follow what the members of your network are doing. The folks who run the social networks want you to visit their web sites, of course, but I find it more convenient to follow the activity of my connections through an RSS reader.

It’s exciting to watch as the social media landscape changes every day. In the near future, it’s likely that some social networks will become important business tools, while others will fade away. In the meantime, we can learn how best to use these tools to increase the success of our businesses, no matter they are online of offline.

Why Freelancers Are Not Needed Anymore to Deviate From Oscommerce Templates?

2009-07-09T04:45:00.001-07:00

How far do you want to deviate from oscommerce template? If it's quite a big change (like you want to entirely do away with their template), it's going to require significantly more work. It can be done though. It really depends how familiar you are with PHP. If you are not that familiar with PHP, I would suggest having someone else make the changes, since they could get pretty involved.

The above scenario is a common situation and question asked by lots of people who tried to use oscommerce to build up their online businesses.

Here is the solution to solve the issue:

Oscommerce Templates + Modify Ebook (project Alpha).

this set of template plus the ebook allows you to build your online store faster, better, and customizable !!!

this set gives you a starting point but eventually want to be able to create a whole new template like on the oscommerce showcases. Even you only have novice PHP knowledge but am willing to learn more all the time. Eventually you will be able to change and configure your online store at you will.

So what you are waiting for? Just go to grab Oscommerce Templates + Modify Ebook (project Alpha).

Five Steps For Successfully Setup Your E-commerce Website with Oscommerce, magento, zencart, prestashop, or opencart

2009-07-08T05:17:00.001-07:00

Getting into ecommerce, especially with open source shopping cart such as oscommerce, magento, zencart, prestashop, or opencart, is used to boost business in today's competitive world. With ecommerce hosting tools, it's easy to promote products and services.

Here are 5 steps to get an ecommerce site running:

1. Build your website
Its time to create your website, either you hire a professional web designer or use our tools. We offer a simple website design tool that enables you to setup your site in minutes. Or, hire a professional website designer.

2. ECommerce store
When you have products or services to offer, make sure to build a ecommerce store so people accessing the site can avail the shopping services. You need to have a shopping cart, like OsCommerce, magento, opencart, zencart, prestashop, etc. along with a step by step to run them.

3. Payment gateway
It is necessary to have a secure payment gateway or maybe a merchant account with which you can help process the payments on purchases.

4. Online payment process
Creating a secure layer to process the payment is very essential. Since credit cards are used, the information provided will have to be secured and confidential.

5. Increase targeted traffic
Once the site has been created, you need to adopt a marketing strategy to boost traffic onto the portal. The best way to start marketing your site is to submit it to the search engines. It is best to do this manually so go to google.com, yahoo.com, etc. and submit your site. It takes about 2-3 weeks for your site to be picked up.

Your ecommerce site is now ready for action!

One Week Marketing Plan: Step by Step System to Develop Online Income

2009-07-06T03:38:00.001-07:00

Over 90% of those people that are new to internet marketing give up. It’s not through lack of effort on their part. It’s frustration through misinformation and lack of guidance. Pure and simple. Even the bag boy at your local grocery store is given a little training and guidance – and they get paid for it too! There is no such free training available for internet marketing.

This lack of training is what leads to so many failures, that's why there is the release of "One Week Marketing Plan".

“One Week Marketing Plan” was written by Jennifer Ledbetter better known as Pot Pie Girl, sharing her experience on how she started an internet business making $154,819.96 a year as a Super Affiliate, using only free methods working from home. If you read her eBook you will quickly see that she is very straight to the point and gives the reader a clear simple step by step guidance of how to make a good living from building Squidoo lenses and writing articles.

"One Week Marketing Plan" utilizes all free methods of internet marketing, which makes this an easy reach, no matter what your finances are. Within one week, you’re first campaign will be up and running and receiving free traffic. You’ll find a niche that is good for you and a product to promote, do your keyword research, set up a Squidoo lens, written and submitted your first “optimized” articles and gotten your Squidoo lens indexed by Google. It can’t get any clearer that how One Week Marketing presents it.

Follow the One Week Marketing Plan and your path won’t be cluttered from the debris of magic and secrets and underground techniques. You’ll will be an internet marketer with the knowledge necessary to succeed.

At this stage, Jennifer is promoting the book by sending you the first 18 pages of One Week Marketing for FREE!! So please in a hurry to grab your free partial copy of this One Week Marketing Action Plan.

Oscommerce vs. Zen Cart vs. Magento vs. Prestashop on SEOs

2009-06-28T23:56:00.001-07:00

This article will describe the most popular open source shopping carts, such as oscommerce, zen cart, magento, and prestashop, with the focus on their capabilities with the SEO, and all of these are based on php/mySQL.

While choosing the best eCommerce shopping cart for online business website people often ignore the SEO while focusing more on the features being offered by the shopping cart.

However, when they have completed the shopping cart installation, configuration and try to promote the online shop, then only they will realize that they are in trouble as some shopping carts are not good prepared for the SEO:

osCommerce

The osCommerce SEO contribution – osCommerce: Ultimate SEO URLs, freely and publicly available, is not well capable of providing the full features for SEO. It requires tweaking to make it a perfect tool to utilize the full potential of SEO.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart, another popular free shopping cart and similar to osCommerce, also offers the SEO friendly URLs capability however customizing it further is a difficult task as it is based on Smarty.

Magento

Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms straight out of the box. The Search Engine Optimization for Magento, enable Server URL rewrites, can be enabled through the script admin area -> System -> Configuration -> Web -> Search Engines Optimization:

Besides, since Magento runs on a form of the Zend Framework, there are numerous options for implementing SEO friendly URLs.

Prestashop
Prestashop has the default templates that are much better than any of other open source shopping carts.

It's also very good at SEO, you can describe articles and products more specific in the meta description and keywords. And it carries with the ROBOT.txt, SITEMAP analysis of documents, as well as Google Analysis Module, you can fill in relevant background from the code, this is not complicated.

Six Critical Steps for Zencart, Oscommerce, Magento, Opencart and Prestashop to Success

2009-06-25T05:27:00.001-07:00

Create an online store using open source shopping cart , such as Zencart, Oscommerce, Magento, Opencart or Prestashop, but How do you get customers? How do you receive payment?

The following six critical steps is the same to all above mentioned shopping cart:

Step 1: Create your website
you can either hire a qualified web designer to create a website for you, or you can use an online site builder. The key point is: Your template may not be unique, but your content will.

Step 2: Set up an e-commerce store
When you set up an e-commerce shopping cart, you're providing a way for your customers to bring their purchases to the cash register. The program you choose will allow you to enter your products in the database and allow shoppers to choose products when they click on "Add to cart" or something similar.
All these well-known shopping carts, zencart, osCommerce, Magento, Opencart and Prestashop, allow you to do these tasks:

Add, edit, and delete product categories and other information
Set tax rates and charge tax
Receive payment via numerous online and offline payment processing methods
Bill customers
And much more

Step 3: Get a merchant account and payment gateway
A merchant account provider authorizes the transfer of payments to your account, and a payment gateway transfers the information from your customers' financial institutions to yours.
Most merchant accounts have setup fees, transaction fees, monthly fees, and statement fees. The transaction fees are less than what you'd pay using a third party credit card processor such as PayPal. With all the fees, however, the overall cost is typically lower only if your monthly sales volume is over about a thousand dollars.

Step 4: Create a secure payment environment
A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate enables you to receive credit card information securely from your customers. When a payment page is using SSL data to encrypt data, a small image of a lock appears at the bottom right of the screen.
Some web hosts offer SSL certificates as part of their hosting packages. If your web host package doesn't include SSL certificates, you can purchase one separately.
Please be noted that With PayPal, no SSL certificate is required.

Step 5: Generate traffic
Your products are on display in your newly designed store, your shopping cart is set up and ready to use, and you have everything in place to be able to receive payments securely. Now all you need are customers.
This is where marketing comes in:

Submit your site to search engines.
Advertise your site.
Keep your company name in front of your customers with a regular email newsletter.
Add more content to your website to keep it fresh.

Monitor your website traffic to see where it's coming from and how you can increase traffic for key content areas.

Step 6: Improve Conversion ratio

The visitors who succeed in buying goods from your online store are called conversions. And your conversion ratio is the percentage of your visitors who convert.

To improve your online store's conversion ratio, Starting from what you consider success, whether it’s filling out a contact form, making a purchase, entering a promotional code, etc. Then map how a visitor might be instructed to get there and trace how a visitor might have seen those instructions. Many site owners find it’s not as easy to convert as they’d envisioned.

Discover How to close more sales by improving your conversion ratio. Learn to match the client's NEEDS with the Features & Benefits associated with your online store's unique products and services. Overcome any objection and close the sale.

In summary, creating an online store using open source shopping cart is easy , such as Zencart, Oscommerce, Magento, Opencart or Prestashop, but following these six critical steps to get customers and receive payment is a long term practice.

simple comparison among Zencart, Oscommerce, Mangeto, Prestashop, Opencart, on Godaddy

2009-06-23T19:52:00.001-07:00

Keywords: Open Source, Shopping Carts, Software Feature, Comparison On Godaddy: Zencart, Oscommerce, Magento, Prestashop, Opencart

Think about it… your ecommerce business will be powered by your chosen shopping carts software, choosing the wrong solution can cause you further headaches in the future.

Below are simple comparison among Zencart, Oscommerce, Mangeto, Prestashop, Opencart, on Godaddy web hosting, based on the following features:

1) How Easy Is It To Use

Magento > Prestashop > Zencart > Oscommerce > Opencart

Almost all shopping carts have point and click interfaces but what may seem easy to someone else may not be simple to you. So, this is very much a personal choice.

You definitely don’t want to waste too much time testing, trying and learning how the software works, so please make sure you choose one that is easy to use.

2) Connection Speed, Stability & Future Growth Potential

Zencart > Opencart > Oscommerce > Prestashop > Magento

When shopping online, people move at internet speed. So, it’s critical that your store loads up quickly and is up and running properly all the time. As being mentioned above, all the comparisons are carried out on Godaddy hosting, there may be a difference is you choose other hosting providers.

3) Store Pages Created Are Search Engine Friendly

Opencart > Zencart > Prestashop > Magneto > Oscommerce

provided that I only installed some easily used plugins, please forgive me if I missed some seo plugins for magento and oscommerce.

Since you absolutely must make sure the shopping cart you choose generates search engine friendly pages with static URLs. the top shopping carts software providers should also give you tools to help your store pages rank well for the search terms you’re targeting. So, those who do provide such tools are a bonus.

4) Promotion Tools

Zencart > Oscommerce > Opencart > Magento > Prestashop

Although you can probably getting a cheaper ecommerce software and buying the marketing tools separately, the best shopping carts include marketing tools to get you started quickly promoting your store and start selling. Since marketing your store is your most important job after you’ve finished building it, any bundled tools will get you started quickly and save you from any large initial investments.

OScommerce vs Zencart vs Magento vs Prestashop: Hands-on Experience shared

2009-06-23T19:33:00.001-07:00

There are many good open source PHP e-commerce systems, such as OScommerce, and developed on the basis of OScommerce by ZenCart and so on.

The first test is OScommerce, regardless of experience or reputation in the industry is a leader of a group, I tried, indeed, very detailed, but the OS template is not independent, it is not too adaptation.

Then try the ZenCart, it is very similar to OScommerce, background interface.

I personally feel that pleasing to the eye than the OScommerce, and that it is independent of the template. Similarly, a breakdown of its features are also very very detailed, because I do not need to consider to calculate the distance freight transport, so I closed it on this option, and then there was BUG - normal freight charges will not be able to show. There is no question of re-playing.

Magento is a very powerful electric business system, but read the introduction, I did not even try try, because it can be from a background of managing multiple sites and stores, which I do not have access to, and there are many other very strong features.

Finally, I chose the PrestaShop , you can Look at the background of its presentation here http://www.prestashop.com/demo/demo/
Need to enter user name: demo@prestashop.com and password: prestashop_demo

First of all, its interface is very easy to use. Functions, I do not think that lost OScommerce and ZenCart, from transportation costs, calculated in different currencies, the choice of trading countries and regions, to cart the design, are in place.
And it more than the default templates that are to be two good-looking too much.

Its very good SEO, you can also describe articles and products into the more specific your description and keywords. And it has been carrying the ROBOT documents, SITEMAP analysis of documents, as well as Google.

Google Analysis Module, you can fill in relevant background from the code, this is not complicated.

Shopping Cart Migration Service to Zen Cart

2009-06-07T18:06:00.001-07:00

If you have made the decision that Zen Cart is the best choice for you, then don’t hesitate - move your store to Zen Cart easily with Cart2Cart. This is unique online shopping cart migration service that allows you to migrate all content of your store quickly and accurately.

Cart2Cart service allows you to migrate products, customers, orders, manufacturers, product categories, images and other data to Zen Cart. Currently the service supports the following shopping carts: osCommerce, X-Cart, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded, Magento, Pinnacle Cart, etc. Other shopping carts will be constantly added to this list.

Make a smart decision for your business - use Cart2Cart to migrate your data and save your time, which you can spend automating other aspects of your store. This professional shopping cart migration service makes your migration to Zen Cart pretty smooth.

6 Steps to Secure Shopping Cart (Oscommerce vs. Zen cart vs. Magento) Payment

2009-05-30T05:53:00.001-07:00

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard is a worldwide information security standard assembled by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). The standard was created to help organizations that process card payments prevent credit card fraud through increased controls around data and its exposure to compromise. The standard applies to all organizations which hold, process, or pass cardholder information from any card branded with the logo of one of the card brands.

The following 6 steps help to Keep Your Shopping Cart (Magento vs. Oscommerce vs. Zencart) Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard PCI Compliant:

1. Make sure your customer checkout and Admin is SSL Encrypted

2. Keep your shopping cart updated to the newest version to protect from SQL Injection hacks, and other security breaches.

3. Provide different access levels and logins to the different people that use the administration section of your website. Don't provide people access to customer credit card information that don't need it (i.e. employees that update product info or website articles). This sometimes involves the installation of the admin access levels module for Oscommerce if you don't already have it installed..

4. Try to avoid store your customer's credit card data, it reduces your risk. You only really need to have the customer credit card data entered on the payment screen, and sent immediately to your payment processor. Your payment is then authorized/captured, and you don't need to store that data any longer.

5. Never store CVV credit card information (3 to 4 digit code on the back of the credit card).
6. If you must store customer credit card data for recurring billing or other applications, many payment processors now offer a service where they store the credit card data, and your shopping cart accesses and bills customers using an API (method of communication). This means that you are no longer responsible for storing that data and don't have that liability.

Based on the guide and practice in security settings, by comparing Shopping Cart features (Magento vs. Oscommerce vs. Zencart) on Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard PCI Compliant: I recommend Zen-Cart as the best shopping cart. It is secure and easily modified. OSCommerce is a good shopping cart but in my opinion is not as secure as Zen-Cart and is harder to customize. The Zen-Cart engine is OSCommerce with added features and a more friendly admin panel. And it is said that there is a security vulnerability in Magento Commerce in 1.2.1.1 (and previous versions) that I believe should be fixed before anyone else uses it.

Oscommerce Based Shopping Cart vs. Magento

2009-05-29T16:03:00.001-07:00

If you decide to go with an Oscommerce based shopping cart, we recommend that you start with one of the loaded versions - Zencart, CRE Loaded, or OSCmax - in order to save you lots of money on installing additional modules to the plain Oscommerce version. You can then use your development money to put in your own custom modifications, design, etc. rather than installing all of the basics.

Furthermore, as an Oscommerce based shopping cart, Zen-cart is not ideal if you want a plug and play solution, which is what most e-commerce businesses need. Over time Zen Cart has improved this issue, but has not completely created a plug and play solution just like Wordpress has. I expect the new version of Zen Cart 2.0 will have this ability, as most open source projects begin to migrate to automatic updates rather than manually installing the plugins ourselves.

Overall I would recommend it as a solution to start off with for any small to medium business owners.

We like Magento but recommend that you wait to use it until they optimize more its speed, and provide better documentation for developers. If you decide to go with Magento, make sure to chose a fast enough web host. it does not run fast enough on most shared hosting plans.

Ecommerce with Open Source Web Development

2009-05-04T21:50:00.001-07:00

Open source web design development, Open Source development solutions are widely acceptable these days because source code is available free and open for editing, developers are free to amend code and upload web pages dynamically in real time.

Open source ecommerce software like magento, Zen cart, opencart, X cart, drupal and many more are used to develop an efficient and reliable Ecommerce shopping cart. Open source provides zero risk, cost effective Ecommerce functionality which leads to powerful ecommerce web development. Whichever Open Source software guarantee of its reliability and flexibility is assured. A fully functional Ecommerce shopping cart and websites can be developed using Open Source software.

There are a good number of firms who have tasted success with eCommerce. Especially the Open source ecommerce applications are being largely used to fillip businesses. The whole game is how to fit the ecommerce app to your benefit.

Joomla with Virtuemart vs Magento: open source shopping cart comparisons

2009-05-03T05:23:00.001-07:00

When comparing joomla with virtuemart and magento, in general:

- Most of all magento features is also available in virtuemart
- Virtuemart have alot of plugins that will make vm more powerful
- there's a lot of joomla templates with can beat magento design too.
For the first sight actually everyone loves magento features (that actually not available natively on vm), in particular, There are few more features that Magento has and virtuemart doesn't. For example those cool promotions like buy "5 items, pay for 4" etc,

however, magento is very good script but is new , virtuemart has a very big community and you can find solution to any problem or modification + they are hundreds joomla templates.

Furthermore, every one complains that Magento is real good but is slower due to its architecture and needs also more Resources.

Thus, at this stage, I will go with Virtuemart, a great extension of Joomla with lot plugins and support.

Online Money Earning Related Modules for Drupal

2009-05-03T05:08:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tag: make money online,ebay,seo,hong kong,online marketing,ppc,making money online,social media,top earning,drop ship,affiliate program,blog,shopping cart,behavioural marketing,media measurement,anayltics,drop shippings,services

Like other open source shopping carts such as opencart, zen-cart, oscommerce, magneto, and prestashop, etc., Drupal, coming with Ubercart and/or e-commerce extensions, can also be configured as an online open source shopping cart system.

Besides to use open-source e-commerce plugins, such as ubercart or e-commerce plugin, to create your own online shop, which features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved, there are also other online money earning related modules can be integrated with Drupal to help you make money online, here are five of them:

1. Your Own Affiliate Program

Affiliate
This module allows site owners to issue affiliate links to their partners. When anonymous users follow these links, the clicks are counted by affiliate, day, and optional keyword. When referred users sign up for an account, the account is associated with that affiliate.

2. Sell “TextLinkAds” on Your Website

TextLinkAds.com Integration
Simplified setup right on your site. All you need is your Website XML Key from Text-Link-Ads.com and you’re ready to start publishing ads. A built-in tool to customize the looks of the ads, including borders, background color, link color and font size. Access to your publisher statistics from within your website. See your site details, including how much money you’ve earned and how many links are being served. Cron-based updates of your ads. The ad links are kept up to date via Drupal’s cron functionality.

3. Paid Listings on your Drupal Website

Pay2Publish
Pay2Publish lets users publish basic versions of listings (nodes) for free, and later be able to pay to “upgrade” them to custom Levels (categories) to add more visibility (Views plays) and/or show more information (CCK fields). set up different “Levels” with different costs and properties (Silver, Gold, Platinum style). Each level will have its corresponding taxonomy (category) term. to upgrade a node, the user will have to buy the desired “Level” and assign it to one of his published nodes. The corresponding taxonomy term will be assigned to the desired node.

4. Sell Content Pages on Your Site

PayPal Node
Use PayPal to charge users to post a specified content-type. Costs are calculated based on combinations of taxonomy terms. Nodes can be set to expire (become unpublished) after a specified number of days. Use this module to create a custom classified advert system, or charge for hosting any content that users might categorize.

5. Ad Management & Tracking

Advertisement
The ad module is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads. Ads can easily be displayed in themes, blocks, or embedded in site content. The module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.

6. Click Thru Tracking & Reporting

Click Thru Tracking
This module provides the ability for site admins to track clicks on their site such as advertising campaigns and newsletter click throughs. The clicks are organized into groups, so ad campaigns can be tracked if they involve more than one node.

In summary, comparing with those typical e-commerce shopping carts, such as opencart, zencart, oscommerce, prestashop, magento, etc. those CMS with ecom plugins, such as drupal with ubercart and joomla with virtuemart, has at least one more features: coming with online money earning related modules to extend these CMS's functionalities.

osCommerce vs. Joomla with Virtuemart: Pros and Cons

2009-04-30T23:19:00.001-07:00

osCommerce and Joomla with Virtuemart are both easy to administrate from each others’ respective admin interfaces.

osCommerce comes close in functionality, but from the developer’s perspective, the code could really benefit from a reorganization and some general TLC. Better comments, cleaner code layout, and a more thought out class structure would definitely boost osCommerce’s standing among developers.

If Joomla continues to grow as (probably) the best web CMS out there, Virtuemart could give osCommerce a run for its money. Having the advantage of being fully integrated into a very rich CMS, managing Virtuemart becomes almost trivial.

Joomla with Virtuemart Pros:

Fast and easy installation and configuration.
Easy to customize and extend.
Shopper groups (vendors, guests, whatever your heart desires. Product prices and descriptions can vary from group to group).
Small codebase, easy to develop for. (it’s just a Joomla module)
Easy to administrate.

osCommerce Pros:

Fast and easy installation and configuration.
Vetted. Though still a development release, it is widely popular and thus has a larger support base.
Lots of plug-ins. Chances are, any feature you need, has already been written by someone else.
Supports most e-commerce standard features out-of-box.

Joomla with Virtuemart Cons:

Still quite a bit on the CVS to-do list. (some functionality could require development if needed immediately)
Not stand-alone. Requires Joomla to function.
Must learn Joomla framework (or at least how to write Joomla modules and templates) to develop custom functionality.

osCommerce Cons:

Large and overly complex code base. Difficult to extend or modify.

In summary, both products support alot of the same features:

Customizable products, carts, shopper account administration, reports, etc…

Joomla with Virtuemart definitely benefits over osCommerce when it comes to extensibility. If you are familiar with Joomla’s framework and templating system, then the sky’s the limit when it comes to extending virtuemart. osCommerce, while certainly popular, is difficult for the developer wade through, lacking meaningful comments and a having a code structure that is haphazard at best.

Open Source Shopping Cart Should Pay more on Trust Factors

2009-04-30T03:40:00.001-07:00

Driving traffic to an open source shopping cart site, such as zen-cart, oscommerce, opencart, magento, prestashop, etc. is difficult in the first place. So, once that traffic starts showing up, the last thing you want those potential buyers to do is to leave before making a purchase, especially true if they found you via PPC because that visitor is going to cost you money for that unfruitful click through.

Most on-line purchases are made using a visitor’s credit card and those names and card numbers are hacked all of the time. So, before you ask a buyer to make a purchase using a credit card, you must first create trust between you and the potential buyer.

The most used trust building factor is the VeriSign logo. VeriSign provides SSL encrypted solutions for on-line businesses. They have an excellent reputation for security and regular on-line buyers and retailers know this. So, use the VeriSign logo throughout your site to build consumer trust.

The second trust factor is to use SSL encryption to secure the on-line transaction. You’ll need an SSL certificate to transmit encrypted data. Sometimes, a web host will let you use its SSL certification but regardless, any savvy on-line buyer is going to avoid making a purchase unless s/he sees that little padlock in the lower right hand corner and an https in the address box. The “s” stands for secure.

Of course, Subscribing to the On-Line BBB definitely can also build visitor trust by becoming a member of the on-line Better Business Bureau which indicates a commitment to service and honesty. The BBB logo displayed on your site’s home page and checkout pages is a comfort to new buyers.

In conclusion, since using open source platform like zen-cart, oscommerce, opencart, magento, prestashop, etc. you should pay more attention on trust factors than those commercial ones, thus need more efforts on methods like using SSL, VeriSign, and BBB.

Free Open Source Shopping Carts That Are SEO Friendly

2009-04-25T04:52:00.001-07:00

This post discusses the best shopping cart that is search engine friendly and gives you the most flexibility and features, by comparing oscommerce, zen-cart, opencart, magento, prestashop, joomla with virtuemart, and drupal with cubercart.

joomla/virtuemart paired up with either sh404sef or artio, makes it outstand other shopping carts.

magento's infrastructure looks good to seo, but haven't see all the plugins or if its seo friendly...

Prestashop is a good script too

cubercart itself is best to seo, thus going with drupal makes the pairs SEO friendly too.

There is a choice if you like to go with wordpress with shopping cart, by using
wp-shopping-cart wordpress plugin, I haven't used this yet, but since wp is the best cms to seo, I believe this wp-shopping-cart wordpress plugin worths a try.

Ecommerce Open Source Shopping Carts Revisited

2009-04-23T18:11:00.001-07:00

Today more and more people are engaging in online business. E-commerce is business carried through the internet. Nowadays more and more people are using the internet to promote and sale their products.

open source shopping cart packages include advanced platforms such as Interchange, and off the shelf solutions as Satchmo, osCommerce, Magento , Zen Cart , OpenCart , VirtueMart and PrestaShop or the dual licensed PhPepperShop. ...

I tried the latest version of Magento and there were too many bugs to bothered with it. Prestashop is looking best, but lacks themes and payment gateways. Zen cart worked well but is a pain to modify the templates to even get a flash file to ... The best is magento , followed by zen cart , both have got plugins and support community. I like open cart . For its simplicity but thumbs down to support and plugin support, joomla virtuecart is good but lacks community support.

7 Steps to Generate Targeted Online Traffic

2009-04-22T01:26:00.001-07:00

I have an established blog alone with shopping carts, using open source cms scripts such as megento, presta shop, opencart, and zencart, that I've just started to monetize. After not having many clicks, I began to realize that while I have lots of traffic, it isn't necessarily traffic that wants to buy something.

So I have begun the process of reoptimizing (who am I kidding the blog wasn't really ever optimized) for targeted traffic that's looking for a good or service.

First I spent some quality time with my favorite keyword tool brainstorming about what folks might want to click on in the shopping cart site related sector. It's a subtle shift between just "informing" and "informing & selling." I also read several magazines to see what people were selling here.

Second, I downloaded some seo related plug-ins so I could optimize my posts, tags, categories, and pages, and finally, shopping cart. That has taken a bit of time.

Third, I made sure that I linked between similar posts and I added static pages geared toward folks interested in my site, such as magento, prestshop, opencart, or zencart. I followed the advice about where to put my important keywords etc.

Fourth, I add 3 to 4 posts a day, with about 350 words in each post. Luckily something is always going on and changing so there's lots to post about!

Fifth, I have written 3 squidoo lenses this week and linked them with the proper keywords back to my site, among the posts and shopping cart. I've made a list of about 25 lenses I should eventually write and the keywords each will focus on. I'm sure that list will grow.

Sixth, I've submitted my blog to a ton of directories.

Seventh, using rss feeds and rss aggreators to build up contents and spread contents online, not only posts, but also items from shopping carts.

But now I see I haven't even come close to having this blog reach it's potential. Nope it's not big at all, but it's a step in the right direction.

PR7 / PR6 Social Bookmarking/PR Sites

2009-04-20T20:45:00.001-07:00

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

14 social bookmarking sites listed here, so make sure you're bookmarking this site !!!

DF = Do-Follow
NF = No-Follow
NF/RD = They using redirect, so it's No-Follow

Site PR Link Price

Betanews.com 7 DF Free
Businesswire.com 7 DF Free

Directionsmag.com 7 DF Free

Marketwire.com 7 DF Free

PRweb.com 7 DF Paid

BizEurope.com 6 DF Free

Emediawire.com 6 DF Paid

IndiaPRWire.com 6 DF Free

Media-newswire.com 6 DF Paid

Nanotech-now.com 6 DF Free

News.thomasnet.com 6 DF Free

PRLeap.com 6 DF Paid

PRlog.com 6 DF Free

programmersheaven.com 6 NF/RD Free

PR9 / PR8 / PR7 / PR6 Directories

2009-04-20T20:31:00.001-07:00

Of course there's much more tools, but I only listed the ones I use frequently, so your turn to share guys...

By my experience, I would say that it is not really necessary to register to thousand directories, just the most interesting, with a very high PR, and in a similar category of the content of the website. Also, create a page of your business in Wikipedia and About.us, if it's a serious business of course

www.dmoz.org 9
www.lii.org/ 8
www.hotfrog.com 7
www.somuch.com 6
www.skoobe.biz/ 6
www.netinsert.com 6
www.jayde.com 6
www.info-listings.com 6
www.gimpsy.com 6
www.geniusfind.com/ 6
www.ezilon.com 6
www.exactseek.com 6
www.clickey.com 6
www.canlinks.net 6
www.buzzle.com 6
www.businessseek.biz 6
www.abilogic.com 6
www.123kidzarea.com 6
www.bdcconcepts.com/directory/ 6
www.epooch.com 6
www.search4i.com 6
www.busybits.com/ 6
www.zensearch.com/ 6
www.dramba.com 6

40 great free link building tips

2009-04-13T22:51:00.001-07:00

Link building is one of the most important parts of website promotion so as to attract more visitors. Here are some great free link building techniques.

Post link on forums in signature.
Do something groundbreaking that gets picked up by a news site.
Give freebies away.
Link to others and they might link to you.
Post your link as a source in Yahoo Answers or other questions sites.
Make an ebook.
Produce great content.
Start an affiliate program.
Link from your other sites.
Go to a dofollow blog and become a top commentator.
Guest post and make sure your link is on the author bio.
Form some sort of partnership with other webmasters.
Submit an article to article sites.
Submit and article to sites that need an article and make sure your link is on it.
Provide a great service.
Offer your service or product for free.(at least at first)
Ask to have your site reviewed.
Become Dofollow and get submitted to Dofollow directories.
Submit to free directories.
Review sites. If you give a good review the site might link to you. You also have a chance for other sites to link to you if you give a bad one.
Get stumbled, dugg, etc.
Build list pages. These seem to work the best in getting links.
Make surveys.
Create a page about your site or blog on Wikipedia and put a link back to it.
If you are have a website(not a blog) start a blog.
Start a charity or other non-profit cause.
Post great videos or pictures.
Get sued. If it a company everyone hates or everyone loves your in.
Build a website/blog about a service everyone loves.
Release a free extension,component, or plug-in.
Have an interview. It needs to be someone who is famous.
Take a unique picture, and allow people to post it on their website if they link back.
Create a theme or template. Make sure you put a Dofollow link in it.
Use trackbacks.
Ask your readers for link love.
Create new articles/posts. Everyone loves to link to them.
Use Craigslist.
Create a squidoo and link back to your site.
Link to your site on Twitter.
Tell readers to tweet posts.

Joomla with Virtmart or with Zencart

2009-04-12T06:16:00.001-07:00

For a website developed with Joomla, it would be better to add a shopping cart so as to attract more traffic.
Here are current opinions about the choice of shopping cart: with Virtmart or with Zencart.

Of course, it would be ideal to looking forward to the full Magento release, it definitely looks the goods. However, Magento is nice but not integrated (yet!)..

Joomla and Virture Mart seem like a good marriage of CMS and 'cart'...But Virtuemart is a pain when you want to customise things.

Thus, current solution for Joomla is with zencart and leave the joomla as it is.

Zencart Review: Online Shoppers Best Choice

2009-04-09T05:05:00.001-07:00

ZenCart shop store is not for online shopping newbies, but it's a whole lot of fun for pseudo-geeks, and there's a learning curve. But Zencart is so flexible once you've got the hang of it! The community is awesome, you can find more info in the forums than any other open source shopping carts, such as magento, opencart, and prestashop, etc.

One of the secrets behind its power lies in the robust template system that "abstracts" the look-and-feel from the code and logic behind Zen Cart. This enables you to give clients a truly custom solution that integrates quickly and perfectly with their existing marketing websites.

I really love the ordered file structure of ZenCart that allows for customization. The shop itself is nice to work with. There's tons of add-ons, and nearly a dozen of them are very helpful, provide good solid content

Zen Cart gives web designers a robust and customizable electronic storefront that's easy to keep up-to-date with new features. It provides usable, intuitive and unobtrusive purchase flows right out of the box based on proven industry best-practices - there are no major revisions required to get things right for your clients!

Add a blog to your Magento store

2009-04-08T04:49:00.001-07:00

Starting a web blog at your open source Magento store is a good way to promote the products you sell. This web blog will be a place for you to communicate with your potential customers and inform them about the advantages of your products. Posting interesting and useful articles you’ll make your blog a reliable online resource which will help you succeed in e-Commerce.

The best and the fastest way to learn is to have a blog implemented into Magento online store with the help of Lazzymonks Blog Extension for Magento. If you are attentive it won’t be a problem for you to enhance your Magento store with a stunning blog.

Note having started a web blog you can review the products you sell at your Magento store and answer your customers’ questions; you can also advice the best way your products can be used for. If you post interesting and relevant content your blog will rank well and search engines will come back to your site again and again bringing good traffic and future clients.

Some thoughts on open source versus commercial shopping carts.

2009-04-05T18:24:00.001-07:00

The biggest decision between open source shopping carts and commercial shopping carts is support.

There are lots of free open-source software out there, such as zencart, megento, prestashop, opencart, etc. The only problem is not all of them have good support systems. Some of them are better than others. If your e-commerce site goes down you shouldn't have to spend three days on a forum trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

I know that some commercial e-commerce software come with a little higher price tag, but as with anything else, usually you get what you pay for. I would just suggest that when choosing an e-commerce software you do your research. Especially if you are planning to go the commercial route. Call the company up and talk to them. See how friendly they are and if you get a good vibe from them. If you are considering the open-source route, make sure you feel comfortable with the on-line community that supports the cart before you implement it. That way when you have questions or issues that you need to fix you can maybe find a quick solution.

Besides, On the downside of open source shopping carts is that it can be quite challenging when a new version is released. It takes time to catch up with a stable version of free open source shopping carts.

The commercial software is quite good and user friendly at this part; however, we found it difficult to properly set up conversion tracking for our various advertising. Although we were growing profitably with this cart, there was always a sense that some of our advertising was being wasted or ineffective.

Top Five CPA Affiliate Programs You Must Try

2009-04-02T23:08:00.001-07:00

Whether you are looking for a CPA (Cost Per Action) affiliate marketing program to join so that you can find products and services to recommend, or you want a program to run your company’s affiliate marketing program, these following programs can make or break your affiliate marketing efforts, :-)

• Commission Junction (cj) - Some of the largest businesses online use Commission Junction. While that’s no reason to rush right over to CJ, you shouldn’t discount it either. They clearly know what they’re doing.

• ClixGalore - ClixGalore has quite a selection of affiliate programs to take advantage of. If you want to start an affiliate marketing program for your company, they can help you with that too.

• LinkShare - One of the leading pay-per-action marketing programs online. Wal-Mart, Lego, and other recognized brands use LinkShare. Not a bad pick.

• ShareASale - A custom program that operates to bring affiliates and products together. Great program.

• Clickbank - Clickbank specializes in digital products: E-books, podcasts, videos, downloads, etc. One of the first affiliate programs to come online, Clickbank pretty much wrote the rules on affiliate marketing and just about every program now online owes a debt to Clickbank for paving the way. If you specialize in retailing digital products, you just might do well at Clickbank.

When you’re ready to start your affiliate marketing program or you are looking for a product to sell as an affiliate, try one of these programs.

Tips to Rank in Other Engines Besides Google for Online Money Earnings

2009-04-02T16:37:00.001-07:00

It's well known that Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, however, as you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Doing businesses using online video is going to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

Also, one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. Thus, try to Rank Higher in image searches by:

Add images to your Google Local Business profile
- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
- Add images to local business citation sources.
- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.
Ranking in Maps/Local Search may seem fairly obvious, but the strategies are different because you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.

finally, Ranking in Blog Search has the following positives:

- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

In summary, there are lots of opportunities to get your site found other than just regular google search.

Opencart vs. Magento: More Discussions

2009-04-01T21:46:00.001-07:00

It is really based on each one's expectations to choose which Open source ecommerce shopping cart to be used. They are actually very different.

For instance, Magento has alot more features "out-of-the-box" than Open Cart, from the outset this software appears to be ideal. It’s very much geared for the modern web developer with it’s trendy feel, complete with snazzy design and gradients on the demo store.

BUT, Magento is a lot more complicated and alot more resource hungry.

Some considerations:
1. Magento requires a fast host which has been optimised for Magento. This host costs loads more than than your average host that can host Opencart.

2. Magento requires lots of time to understand and modify the layout.
Try out Opencart on a free hosting account and see if it's what you need.

I would choose Open Cart for a small site and Magento for a large huge site or if I was a developer deploying multiple sites for my clients.

I left Magento because it runs and I don't consider paying for a dedicated server to be cost effective for my size.

CB vs. CJ CPA Affiliate Programs

2009-04-01T01:55:00.001-07:00

There are always debates between choosing cb (clickbank) or cj (commission junction) as your CPA affiliate program. Here are the comparisons I summarized based on some debates over Internet:

Clickbank (cb):
high percentage commission and 15-day payout. Because Hottest selling products online are digital ebooks. However competition is a bit higher bit if you can break even the ROI is awesome! So choosing Clickbank if your audiences buy digital products.

if you like "freestyle" method of promoting, since creating affiliate links and starting is pretty easy in clickbank, however, clickbank affiliate links can be changed to their own affiliate names easily and thus it will cut your commissions.

If you're just looking for blind traffic to your website and require credit card payment services, go with ClickBank, because CB doesn't give it's merchants much as far as reporting goes, and no contact with the affiliates running your program.

Finally, CB has more refund rate.

Commission Junction (CJ):
CJ has tons of high-quality products, but too many rules for cj. don't do this and that, or your relationship with the advertiser will be cut.

CJ has dynamic affiliate links, so can't easily to change...

If you're looking to build relationships with your affiliates and already have access to credit card processing, go with Commission Junction.

BTW., there are many affiliate networks which offer similar services to CJ, and do so at far more reasonable prices. For instance, there's Shareasale.com if your program is for a shopping cart type per-sale website.

In summary, choosing CB for good commission rates and choosing CJ for better company choices.

Customization comparison: osCommerce vs. zencart vs. magento vs. opencart vs. prestashop

2009-04-01T01:29:00.001-07:00

Customizing the open source ecommerce shopping carts for a unique online experience for visitors is vitally important for shopping cart owners. Below offers the evaluation of each open source shopping cart application's customization capabilities.

osCommerce
Layout of the osCommerce pages is table based. There is very little customization that can be done from the admin panel.

Zen Cart
Based on osCommerce, Zen Cart's layout is DIV based and relies more on CSS than its predecessor. ZC also offers more configuration options from the admin panel, such as configuring the columns and side boxes to include and offering an admin based editor for changing information included on several standard pages including the main page.

Magento
Magento has implemented their own version of "Themes" in the design of the Magento pages. Their themes are implemented on a modular basis and provides an unprecedented flexibility in design choices, including the ability to have different designs on a per page basis. This flexibility comes at the cost of complexity, including a complex software architecture.

OpenCart
OpenCart has a relatively simple architecture for controlling the look and layout of pages. Even without formal documentation, It is not very hard to figure out how it works and how to make changes. The architecture makes it possible to create multiple template sets that can be applied from the admin panel.

PrestaShop
PrestaShop allows for the turning off and on different page elements from the admin panel as well as the ability to edit the home page title and description. This includes the ability to change the position of the various elements. Beyond that, they use a theme architecture similar to OpenCart's. There are CSS files and template files that can also be edited.

Tips to Use ClickBank Affiliate Program

2009-03-31T06:43:00.001-07:00

1. Use the following sites where they evaluate ClickBank products. These sites can be helpful for a beginner like me to decide which products to promote.

http://www.clickbankguide.com/productreviews.htm
http://www.clickbankhotshots.com/
http://www.clickbankproductreview.com/

ClickBank Affiliate FAQ page: http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_faq.html

2. Find products that are highly relevant to the content of your website or web pages.

3. Carefully read about the product from its vendor’s site before you start to promote it. If you don’t think the web site is trustworthy enough or the product has good quality, don’t promote that product. If you wouldn’t want to buy it, probably other people wouldn’t buy it either.

4. When you write reviews of ClickBank products to promote them, be a honest consumer rather than be a salesperson or an affiliate. Focus on the strengths of the product while frankly talking about flaws.

How to Have Magento Working on Godaddy

2009-03-31T06:19:00.001-07:00

To have Magento working on GoDaddy Linux platform, you can follow a few steps from the installation instructions on forums from Internet:

1. Install Magento eCommerce application by downloading the latest Full Release Magento package (magento-1.3.0.zip), uploading the zip, and unarchiving it using the GoDaddy:FileManager:Unarchive function. Should unpack into a magento/ directory.

Note: There are also some special instructions on the forum for people who do not want to install to a magento/ directory but to the root.

2. Ensure that the directories app/etc , var , and media are writable by the web server. To do so, navigate to the directory with your FTP client and change to 777.

3. Make sure that you have the full mysql database name, and the correct address for where your mysql database is stored.

Still, people complains that the big problem is speed, it is painfully slow. Any optimizations help would be appreciated.

PS:
A common error, which usually comes up if you’re hosted by GoDaddy, is the no input file specified error.
There are a couple of things you can do to fix this, but we’ll start with the one that usually works. In your magento/ directory, there should be a file called php.ini. Rename this to php5.ini. If that doesn’t work, add the following to the end of your newly renamed php5.ini file:
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
And if you’re still getting the error, add the following to the top of your .htaccess file:
Options -MultiViews

there’s a few more things that can be done, just check out the official posting about this issue here.

PPS

If you are needing a quick jump start with developing with Magento, I strongly recommend reading through the material provided by the Magento site.

Suggestions for magento on godaddy

2009-03-30T17:06:00.001-07:00

with referring to this godaddy installation instructions for magento:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/5023/

I have almost successfully installed and run Magento on godaddy for a deluxe share hosting package with php5 environment: I can see the front page shown after the installation on godaddy, but magento is still not running properly: magento can run homepage, wishlist, popular search, etc all right, but it run into blank pages at many points, e.g. about us, customer service, etc. The only difference I can see is the step 10. select destination...leave at root default. I didn't do this because I have other program on it, so I chose a directory for the installation. And I did add php5.ini as the instruction shared, changing the .htaccess file by following the detailed guide for GoDaddy params also didn't work.

By all means, to my opinion, magento is not suitable to run on a share hosting package. Installing magento on Godaddy share hosting account can only be used for demonstration purpose, I guess.

Open Source Shopping Cart VirtueMart (VM) Together with CMS Joomla! (Mambo)

2009-03-30T08:31:00.001-07:00

As the 4th topic, after:

Shopping Cart Focused Portal with 4 Open Source PHP Programs

Integrating Shopping cart like Magento, Zencart With Wordpress

Ubercart for Drupal to Combine a Fully Functional Community

here we have VirtueMart, an Open Source E-Commerce solution being used together with Content Management System (CMS) Joomla! (and Mambo). Joomla! and VirtueMart are written in PHP and made easy for use in a PHP/MySQL environment

you can extend the Functionality of Joomla! and VirtueMart using Plugins, Components, Templates and Modules to make them do what you need.

Furthermore, it's more than fair to also mention one commercial affiliate solution, which supports VirtueMart+Joomla!: VM Affiliate . It's is a complete affiliate solution designed specifically for VirtueMart and Joomla! It is J!1.5 native, and VM 1.1 compatible, yet supports any older version.

Ubercart for Drupal to Combine a Fully Functional Community

2009-03-30T07:57:00.001-07:00

Although they have been in open source ecommerce world for not very long, oscommerce, zen-cart, and CRE loaded have been treated as the old guy, while Ubercart, magento and prestashop have become the new crop.

the desire of Ubercart, one of new generation open source shopping cart, is to move osCommerce sites to Drupal so as to take advantage of Drupal's strong content management and search engine optimization.

As the topics talked in

Shopping Cart Focused Portal with 4 Open Source PHP Programs

Integrating Shopping cart like Magento, Zencart With Wordpress

what is unique about Ubercart is that its tight integration with Drupal allows you to seamlessly combine a fully-functional community, business or news Web site with e-commerce. This allows Ubercart store owners to sell members-only access to premium paid content, with automatic renewals and expiration of user access. The integration with Drupal also gives the option of using blogs, social networking, forums, newsletters or custom displays of content. It also allows the store owner to offer paid file downloads such as music, videos, e-books and software.

Other features of Ubercart include a flexible product attributes system that modify the price, SKU/model, and/or weight of items as the customer adds them to his or her cart; single page checkout, simple order processing screens, and automatic user account creation based on the user's e-mail address.

For customers, different views are possible for product display and organization by selected fields, page views and filters. "Userpoints" allows users to accumulate points for doing certain things on your Web site, such as moderating, commenting or posting notes. And leveraging the power of Drupal gives Ubercart excellent search engine optimization, content publishing capability and support for themes or templates.

For developers, Ubercart works with Drupal's Content Construction Kit, a suite of modules that allow products to be customized. Drupal's secure application framework and search engine optimization features are extended to Ubercart as well. There is a large community of developers, themes or templates and many consultants available. The program can be installed manually or via a Web-based installer.

Shopping Cart Focused Portal with 4 Open Source PHP Programs

2009-03-30T02:09:00.001-07:00

In previous blog, Integrating Shopping cart like Magento, Zencart With A Wordpress Blog, we learnt that there are great benefits with having both shopping cart such as zen cart, magento, prestashop, oscommerce, etc. integrated with wordpress into your Internet business, and someday shopping carts with integrated blogs will be the new community. This post takes a step further, talking about shopping cart focused portal with four open source php programs.

Nowadays, many website hosting providers offer free open source programs that will enable you to create professional-grade websites that will help you build your business. These programs are all capable of producing websites for the purposes of search engine optimization, depending on how they are designed and constructed and what plugins are used, and they vary in terms of ease-of-use (learning curve), community support, flexibility, and Web 2.0 compatibility.

1. Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a shopping cart content management system that will help you generate pages for thousands of products. This can be used for any product-based website, and it can accept credit cards through Paypal or any other major online payment gateway.

Adding products is as easy as writing in accurate descriptions and uploading images. Products can be arranged in categories and subcategories. This shopping cart is suitable for both physical and virtual products, but modifying it will require skills in graphic design because the standard template appears a bit outdated.

This shopping cart can act as a standalone website, or it can be installed into a sub-directory of your main site.

2. Joomla

The Joomla content management systems is capable of creating dynamic websites that can contain a wide variety of interactive and visually impressive features. Many corporate and personal websites use this CMS because it can be easily modified, and it can manage and organize thousands of pages.

There is a vast community of developers and designers that provides addons and plugins that are called "components" and "mambots". Free plugins such as discussion forums, shopping carts, media galleries, Google Adsense scripts, and blogs are available.

Web pages in Joomla are considered "content items" that are categorized hierarchally in sections and categories. Each section contains categories, and as "content items" are created, they must be assigned to categories.

In addition, there are hundreds of free Joomla templates available on the web that you can download and modify, or you can create your own template if you have some web-design skills.

Alternatively, you may use Drupal.

3. Wordpress

The Wordpress CMS was specifically designed for blogging, but it can do that and a whole lot more. There are thousands of free templates and themes available online at the wordpress site.

Wordpress is even easier to use than Joomla, and it enables users to share, create, and advertise their content. Wordpress plugins can be installed through any FTP program, and they can add shopping carts, analytics, and photo galleries to your site.

Webpages are created either by blog posts or making new pages under the "Manage" tab. Links on the side or top menu can be modified under the "Blogroll" tab, and much like Joomla, themes can be changed on the fly under the "Presentation" tab.

From an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective, this CMS is fairly effective in getting decent keyword ranking in Google and other search engines if you install the "All-in-one-seo-pack" plugin and build a site with solid content.

4. Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI - or Server Side Includes - function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. It is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is the next generation of forum software - and best of all it is and will always remain completely free.

As well, alternatively, you may use phpBB or myBB.

Integrating Shopping cart like Magento, Zencart With A Wordpress Blog

2009-03-29T05:16:00.001-07:00

Internet users have found blogs to be more compelling to look at than just shopping sites. Most blogs have written reviews and information relating to a product or service, allowing any web user to do their research before making a purchase. The review sites usually only provide a review and opinions, but don’t have a link saying where to buy.

This is where having a shopping cart integrated with a Wordpress blog can benefit your Internet business. Instead of the customer going to other websites to read reviews and opinions about the product (by that time they may have forgotten your website), you can have your own reviews and comments linked to your products. This encourages the customer to stay on your website and helps them save time looking for other places for reviews and opinions.

Additionally, the benefit of having a Wordpress blog integrated with your shopping cart system, is that it helps to increase your search engine rankings. With higher search engines rankings, your Internet business will be found much quicker and also help with becoming an authoritative site.

Here are two integrations we look at:

Magento: This is a relatively new e-Commerce system that is taking the e-Commerce Open Source market by storm. It’s very user friendly and is very powerful, just like how Wordpress has been very successful for many Internet businesses. Magento has an add-on extension called Lazzymonks Wordpress Integration 2.61, which allows Wordpress to be integrated with their system. You can easily access Wordpress from Magento’s administration as well and would save you the hassle of logging out of Magento and logging into Wordpress.

ZenCart: This is the system I have been using for many years for many of my clients and own e-Commerce shops. It is easy to set up the Wordpress On Zencart add-on with a few installation files to upload. Though, I found it wasn’t matching the style of the shopfront at first with this basic add-on.

In summary, with many Internet businesses seeing the growth of web users searching on blogs and search engines today, it would be unfortunate to see you lose sales because you did not have a blog integrated with your shopping cart. There are great benefits with having both these systems integrated into your Internet business and someday shopping carts with integrated blogs will be the new community.

DIY to Get Free CBAds, Clickbank Mall, Search Box

2009-03-29T01:12:00.001-07:00

Everyone agrees that Affiliate Marketing is the best thing to do. But it is profitable only when you know the source of traffic. As an affiliate, you should be able to track your clicks and sales. This is more important when you are promoting the sites with the help of Google Adwords or any PPC.

For instance, utilizing the Ads concept, a new form of high earning potential ClickBank Ads were designed. These CBAds have remarkable features and are much efficient in terms of earning power, for example

1. You are awarded with full affiliate commission rather than pay per click for any sale

2. The affiliate commission ranges upto 75% of the product price, so you can make good money.

3. You have a perfect control over the Ads displayed.

4. There are no restrictions for Ads placement.

5. You have the flexibility to display the Ads depending upon your choice of keywords.

In addition, you might be aware that CBTopSites is one of the best free Clickbank mall site available over the internet. This unique Clickbank mall is so flexible that you can alter the things as you like in it. You can edit the meta tags, meta description. Recently, it has gone a step further and provided the tracking ID concept.

With the help of tracking ID, you can simply analyze how and from where you are getting the sale. So you can select your own tracking ID something like TID=blog/article/forum/PPC/Adwords/MSN/Yahoo/etc. Then it will be easier to monitor your sales and other related activity. It will also help you to compare and analyze the sales something like comparison charts.

By having the tracking ID in your link, you can analyze whether to continue that promotion activity or not. So you will not be wasting your time and money on those unproductive methods.

Import of ZenCart database into Magento using the osCommerce import tool

2009-03-28T00:03:00.001-07:00

By following the guide in the Wiki (http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/creating_an_oscommerce_import_profile) and renaming the database tables. Database table names are the main issue.

Firstly, make a copy of existing Zen Cart db, then renamed all of the tables (in the copy). The reason to rename the tables was to remove the prefix (zencart_tablename renamed to tablename). Afterthat, the import tool did what it was suppose to . . . . . kind of!

Here’s what the import tool did not do: It did not import references to additional photos, so every product was imported with only its default image. No attributes were imported. Some odd characters showed up in the product descriptions, but that could be to do with character sets, not sure. The product descriptions were dumped in to both the description field and the short description field. Product and category META did not import. Product and category sort settings were dropped.

So, even after using the import tool—you will basically have to go back to every imported product and re-do. Customers and orders did import just fine, though.

Today, more and more people like a lot of the features of Magento, and it had been seriously considering migrating. However, it is not sure if it is worth the effort—yet. Zen Cart works flawlessly and it feels a lot more stable. Zen Cart is, at least in the experience, much faster than Magento.

25 Free Open Source Zencart Modules and Support Sites

2009-03-15T00:07:00.001-07:00

Here are 25 Free Open Source zencart modules and support sites:

Addons and Contributed Modules, shopping cart software | Zen Cart ...

shopping cart software | Zen Cart Ecommerce Solution , Addons and Contributed Modules, Addons and ... Learn tips, tricks and secrets for your Zen Cart Sign up for our FREE ...

Free Zen Cart Modules & Scripts

At PRO-Webs, we customize a lot of Zen Carts... To this end we have some cool scripts and workarounds you might find valuable. You can download most of these scripts and modules ...

Free Trial License Request

Zen Cart Free Modules Zen Cart Addons Zen Cart Data Feeds ... 2CO is an authorized retailer for services provided by MagneticOne company

Free Shipping Module Bug - Zen Cart Support

Free Shipping Module Bug General Questions ... I think I have found a bug with the free shipping module. I'm using a fresh install of 1.3.7.

Free Shopping Cart Diagnostic Utility

Greatly help to diagnoze shopping cart configuration problems - osCommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen Cart, X-Cart

Home - Mod Your Zencart

We welcome you to your modding source for your individual Zen-Cart! Feel free to contact us for a free quote for complete Zen-Cart modules, hosting, webdesign or an entire project ...

Free Shipping Module Bug - Zen Cart Support

Free Shipping Module Bug General Questions ... Learn tips, tricks & secrets for your Zen Cart™ Sign up for our FREE Newsletter

Canada Post Module - Zen Cart Support

Canada Post Module Contributed/Addon Shipping Modules ... Learn tips, tricks & secrets for your Zen Cart™ Sign up for our FREE Newsletter

zencartbuilder.com, Zen Cart modules, featuring Easy Populate Advanced

... ecommerce shop, online shopping, ecommerce store, ecommerce modules, zen cart modules, zen ... This free Zen Cart template is an XHTML version of the Zen Cart Classic template, and is ...

R+L Carriers Zen Cart Shipping Module (Freight) : Free Zen Cart ...

Free Zen Cart Templates 4 free shopping cart R+L Carriers Zen Cart Shipping Module (Freight) - "With over 40 years of service, R+L CARRIERS has grown from one truck to a fleet of ...

Zen Cart Modules

Quality Zen Cart Modules to improve your ZenCart-based store ... Zen Cart Modules. Zen Cart Free Modules. Zen Cart Addons. Zen Cart Data Feeds ...

Addons and Contributed Modules, shopping cart software | Zen Cart ...

... software | Zen Cart Ecommerce Solution , Addons and Contributed Modules, Addons and Contributed Modules, open source ... Zen Cart. Sign up for our FREE ...

Free Shopping Cart Diagnostic Utility

... cart configuration problems - osCommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen Cart, X-Cart ... Zen Cart Modules. Zen Cart Free Modules. Zen Cart Addons. Zen Cart Data Feeds ...

Free Zen Cart Templates : Free Zen Cart Templates 4 free shopping cart

... Shipping Modules free zen cart templates, zen cart templates, zen cart seo, ... Atheme - A Free Professional Zen Cart Template ...

Zen Cart Shipping Modules : Free Zen Cart Templates 4 free shopping cart

... Cart Templates 4 free shopping cart : Zen Cart Shipping Modules - Rent-A-Coder ... R+L Carriers Zen Cart Shipping Module (Freight) ...

Free Zen Cart Modules & Scripts

... scripts and modules for free here and most in the Zen Cart Contribution section also. ... SEO - Optimization Site Reports Link Building Free Zen Cart Scripts ...

Adding shipping modules in Zencart - Zencart Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to add shipping modules in Zencart. ... Tutorials: Free Zencart Tutorials: Adding shipping modules in Zencart ...

Latest Press : Zen 4 Dummies! Creative Zen Cart Templates, Zen Cart ...

Disclaimer: The modules listed in the section are available from zencart.com. ... If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact Zen 4 Dummies ...

Numinix • Quality Ecommerce Solutions: Programming, Templates, SEO

Free Zen Cart modules for promoting and managing your Zen Cart based ecommerce store. ... of working with Numinix, browse through our large collection of free Zen ...

Adding payment modules in Zencart - Zencart Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to install payment modules in Zencart. ... Tutorials: Free Zencart Tutorials: Adding payment modules in Zencart ...

Zen cart Development Company India Zencart Integration Customization ...

Offshore software development company India Zencart outsourcing custom software consulting services Website Design Integration Customization modules developing ...

Account Holders, shopping cart software | Zen Cart Ecommerce Solution

shopping cart software | Zen Cart Ecommerce Solution Account Holders, This is a simple rework of the existing CHECK/MONEYORDER Module, and it behaves in exactly the ...

zencartbuilder.com, Zen Cart modules, featuring Easy Populate Advanced

zencartbuilder.com : - Modules Templates Services Zen Cart, Easy Populate, EZ Populate, osCommerce, CRE Loaded, The Exchange ... XHTML - free template! Payment ...

Zen Cart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zen Cart. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Jump to: ... through external module ... under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. ...

About Web Development by Activo " 5 Important Zen Cart Modules

... a handful of modules from the free software add-ons of the official Zen Cart site. ... The Ultimate SEO for Zen Cart module modifies the default clunky ...

Zencart vs. Magento: features comparisons

2009-03-13T16:43:00.001-07:00

ZenCart, which was initially based on osCommerce code but has developed dramatically and now it is a fully independent product. Known for its long list of added features, ZenCart is PHP-based and uses a MySQL database and HTML components.

Zen Cart is unique in its own way. Some of its features are as under:

Wide Range of Administrative Tools:

a) You can configure image of products, customer details and other things very easily.
b) You can Edit HTML code if you have knowledge of HTML.
c) You can add/edit/delete product/category details.

Simple Installation

a) Built in installation tool can be used to install zencart.
b) A separate section for demo products.
c) Before installing zencart, you can check server and database requirements.

Status Mode of Customers

a) This feature can force your visitors to get registered before viewing the price of a product.
b) A visitor can shop whatever he likes from your online stores.

Products and Proper Categories

a) You can add whatever category that suits your requirements.
b) You can a separate section for downloadable products such as video games, softwares, anti-virus etc.
c) You can one product in multiple categories as well.
d) Radio Button, check box, drop down menus can be added in your e-commerce website.

Some other Features

    * Multiple display modes
    * Multiple shipping options
    * Multiple payment options
    * Multiple ad banner controller
    * Multiple discounts and sales
    * Numerous Zen Cart Temples to choose from

As for Magento, here is a simple description: a basic, simple shopping cart that:

"paging” within a Wordpress blog—able to easily design it to look like the blog.
Does not require an SSL to work.
Does not require customers to set up an account.
Uses Google checkout AND Paypal as payment gateways.

Furthermore, one of the things that make Magento such a helpful tool to use when setting up an eCommerce site is the reports and analytics feature. This tool, which is built into the core Magento code, allows you to track sales, watch your shopping carts, learn about your customers, and analyze your traffic patterns, all from your administrative panel. You can also download all of the reports to an Excel spreadsheet or CSV to make it easier to keep track of your numbers.

In summary, as people always say: choose the one you like.

Top Open Source Shopping Cart Review Unveiled

2009-03-13T16:32:00.001-07:00

Original Title: Top Open Source Web Commerce Apps

March 5, 2009
By Kerry Watson

What a difference a year makes. Rarely does an industry landscape change so radically in just 12 short months. This year the upstart New osCommerce Project was crowned Best Open Source Commerce program by respondents in my Second Annual Open Source Commerce survey. It was followed by CRE Loaded, the original osCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop and a long list of "Other open source commerce programs."

Best Open Source Commerce Program: Then and Now

A year ago, the CRE Loaded version of osCommerce was crowned best open source commerce program by respondents, followed by Zen Cart, osCMAX and osCommerce.

Editor's Picks

» osCommerce is Dead: Long Live the NEW osCommerce Project

» Open Source E-Commerce Platform Magento Debuts

» osCommerce is Dead: Long Live the NEW osCommerce Project

» Open Source Watch: CRE Loaded 6.31 Released

» Open Source Watch: Magento 1.1 Released

» Open Source Watch: Specialty Hosts for E-Tailers

» OS Commerce: The True Cost of Free Shopping Carts

» Open Source: Noteworthy Newcomers PrestaShop, Ubercart

» Can Iozzia Get the CRE Loaded Love Back?

» First Annual Open Source Survey Results

» Open Source E-Commerce: Twelve Promising Programs

This year 39 percent of respondents voted for the winner New osCommerce Project, an offshoot of the moribund original osCommerce. This year's winner is followed closely by CRE Loaded with 36 percent of respondents. Last year CRE Loaded was far and away the winner, receiving votes three to one over the second place program. The original osCommerce maintains its third-place position, same as last year, but just barely, after receiving only 10 percent of all votes.

Survey Reveals Greater Industry Fragmentation

Last year the vast majority of votes went to osCommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen Cart and osCMAX, and there were virtually no "Other" votes. This year, only CRE Loaded remains in the top three. Two newcomers — the New osCommerce Project and Magento — pushed last year's second place ties, Zen Cart and osCMAX, off of this year's top tier.

An explosion of changes in the industry last year led a full 15 percent of this year's respondents to vote for other programs including Magento, PrestaShop, CS-Cart and a handful of other programs.

A year ago, Magento Commerce, a new open source e-commerce program that enjoyed wild popularity when it debuted in April last year, was not yet released for the last survey. Through most of the past year it looked like Magento was a sure thing to win, place or show, but was suddenly eclipsed with the release of the New osCommerce Project in November.

Individual Category Winners

When a program is viewed in only one category, the results can be very different. To help prevent the vote from being a pure popularity contest, the supporting survey questions are designed to help find out exactly why respondents nominate a particular program. This is because the programs have different strengths that appeal to different types of users, so it helps us to validate the data. It's also an effective method because users value different things — for instance, one user will consider a program the best because it is easiest to upgrade while another because it is friendly to store owners or customers.

In my survey, for example, voters are asked to choose only the program easiest to install, and PrestaShop is the winner in that category. Zen Cart is still the winner for easiest to upgrade.

CRE Loaded was given the highest rating by its voters in the greatest number of categories, including easiest to make additions, and most friendly to customers, store owners and Web pros.

PrestaShop, the second-newest program on the market with a July launch last year, was given the highest rating by its voters as easiest to install, and was rated very high as well for upgrading and friendliness to Web pros.

New osCommerce Project, launched in November, received high ratings by voters for easiest to install, make additions, upgrade, and friendliness to Web pros. It is basically the original osCommerce, but with the code cleaned up and no contributions installed, so it makes sense that it would win in these categories.

Interestingly, Magento was rated by its voters as very customer-friendly and store-owner friendly, but very unfriendly to Web pros. This may be because the architecture of the program is radically different from the other open source programs, forcing Web pros to invest a lot of time learning before they are able to use it.

Winners by individual category:

Easiest to Install: PrestaShop
Easiest to make additions: CRE Loaded
Easiest to upgrade: Zen Cart
Most friendly: CRE Loaded

Overall Winner by # of Votes*	Voted easiest to Install	Voted easiest to make additions	Voted easiest to upgrade	Voted most customer-friendly	Voted most friendly to store owners	Voted most friendly to Web pros	Overall Winner by Weighted Rating**
New osCommerce Project	PrestaShop	CRE loaded	Zen Cart	CRE loaded	CRE loaded	CRE loaded	CRE loaded
CRE Loaded	CRE loaded	PrestaShop	PrestaShop	Magento	Magento	PrestaShop	PrestaShop
Original osCommerce	New osCommerce Project	New osCommerce Project	New osCommerce Project	PrestaShop	PrestaShop	New osCommerce Project	New osCommerce Project
Magento	Magento	Magento	Magento	Zen Cart	Zen Cart	Zen Cart	Magento
PrestaShop	Original osCommerce	Original osCommerce	CRE loaded	New osCommerce Project	Original osCommerce	Magento	Zen Cart
Zen Cart	Zen Cart	Zen Cart	Original osCommerce	Original osCommerce	New osCommerce Project	Original osCommerce	Original osCommer

*Overall Winner is the raw popularity, the program that received the most raw votes regardless of whether or not they matched the supporting questions.
**Overall Winner by Weighted Rating ranks the programs by votes received for each of the supporting questions.

About the survey

The Second Annual Open Source Commerce survey includes both a "beauty contest" store design contest for store owners and Web professionals, and a serious survey on what actual users consider to be the best of the industry. Although like any Web survey the results can be influenced by a candidate's campaigning, each respondent is required to answer a short series of questions to help explain why he or she believes the candidate is the best.

It is important to note that any survey on the Web is not a scientific sampling, even when careful controls are used. Not all respondents will answer all questions, and not all questions receive a statistically significant number of responses. Also, it is impossible to independently verify that a respondent has actual experience with a subject.

To improve reliability, this study compares the IP address and e-mail address of each respondent and eliminates duplicate votes. The series of questions that are required with each entry help to eliminate casual voting by persons who did not have actual knowledge of the program, boosting the reliability of these data. Nevertheless, comparing the results over a period of time reveals interesting trends in opinions by actual users.

The Users Have Spoken

This is the second annual study of open source commerce programs by actual users, and the survey results this year correlate well with last year's results. Once again, the survey results imply that the most popular open source commerce programs are correlated with the most user-friendly features toward the store owner. The most popular programs will also be the easiest to install, add additions and upgrade. They will also contain the most features that are geared toward the store owner, rather than the end customer or Web pro. It is hoped that the results of this regular survey will help improve the industry. Congratulations to the winners.

This article was first published on ECommerce Guide.

open source shopping cart brief

2009-03-13T16:14:00.001-07:00

One of the most important problem for e-commerce merchants today is which shopping cart solution to choose for their web stores. There are number of shopping carts available in the market. A recent Google search on “online shopping cart” turned up 20 million hits, many of them offering shopping cart products of their own. So decision is very tough.

Open source shopping cart is good choice as : open source available at no cost . There was a time when many in the e-commerce world was not ready to use open source products. Some said they were difficult to install and configure, while others were not using it because of their lack of available features and technical support. Fortunately for online entrepreneurs on a budget, those days are all but gone.

The latest open source shopping carts offer pretty much everything you’d find in a proprietary solution, provided you have the basic technical expertise to install and configure them. Most have become much easier to install than previous offerings and include numerous developer contributions for increased features and customization. Technical support tends to come in the form of user forums and the are heavily trafficked and often get answers in a matter of minutes.

Canonical URL Links' SEO for Zen Cart

2009-03-09T06:42:00.001-07:00

Canonical URL Links support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Google’s announcement that they have (along with Yahoo! and Microsoft) adopted this canonical attribute for link tags, this is great news for SEO’s. This special attribute is great tool for resolving duplicate content issues within a given website.In the last 24hrs.

I have seen several plugins and code snippets appear which will allow webmasters to take advantage of the canonical url attribute within various open source CMS platforms. I didn’t however see anything for use in Zen Cart that struck my fancy. Since Zen Cart is my preferred shopping cart system I decided to write a simple PHP script(let) so that my Zen Carts could take advantage of the canonical attribute.

The following code is easily implemented, and may be freely distributed and used (at your own risk of course).

The Code:

<!– Begin SE Canonical –>
<link rel=”canonical” href= <?php
$original_url = HTTP_SERVER . $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’];
$split_url = explode(’?', $original_url);
$no_querystring_url = $split_url[0];
echo $no_querystring_url; ?> />
<!– End SE Canonical –>

The Install

Simply copy and paste the script right after the closing title tag (</title>) of your html_header.php file (located in your Common folder of your custom template folder in your Zen Cart installation).

Zen Cart & Wordpress Integration

2009-03-09T06:31:00.001-07:00

WordPress is an extremely powerful and widely used open-source blogging platform. It has a wide community of developers and users, and almost all kinds of plugins are available for it. Although there are some shopping cart plugins for WordPress, they are not full-blown shopping carts like Zen Cart or osCommerce. E-commerce plug-ins available for WordPress have limited features.

Those who are running blogs using WordPress may want to integrate it with Zen Cart to provide e-commerce functionality to their blogs. In fact, there is a Zen Cart module for integrating these two. You can download that module from www.zen-cart.com.

After downloading the plug-in WordPress on Zen Cart, you have to install it on the webserver. You can install the plug-in in two ways: first, in an environment where you have a working WordPress installation, and second, when you have not installed WordPress.

WordPress and Zen Cart Installed in Separate Directories

When you have an existing installation of WordPress, generally it will be in a separate directory from that of the Zen Cart installation. If your web document root directory is public_html, then the installation directories may be: /public_html/blog and /public_html/shop. Follow these procedures to install WordPress on Zen Cart plug-in:

Step1: Install WordPress

If you have not installed WordPress yet, then download the WordPress files from www.wordpress.org and unzip the files. Then, upload the files to your webserver’s /public_html/blog directory. Now, change the permission of this directory to 777 and point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/setup-config.php. The installation wizard for WordPress will be displayed. Follow the instructions on the wizard and give the necessary information. Once all of the information is given, WordPress will be installed.

Step 2: Configure WordPress

During installation, an administrative account will be created. Note the username and password for this account. Then, point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/. The login page will be displayed. Type the username and password for the administrative account and click on the Login button.

You will see the dashboard for administering WordPress. Go to Options | General. Now, change the Blog Address (URL) to Zen Cart’s URL http://yourdomain.com/shop/. From the administration dashboard, go to Presentation | Themes and select WordPress Default 1.6.

Step 3: Upload WordPress on Zen Cart

When you unzip the WordPress on Zen Cart plug-in zip file, you will find that there is a directory called ZC_ROOT and WP_ROOT. Now, upload the contents of ZC_ROOT directory to Zen Cart’s installation path on the server, that is, /public_html/shop/. Similarly, upload the contents of the WP_ROOT directory to WordPress’ installation path, that is, /public_html/blog. Before uploading the contents of the ZC_ROOT directory, please change the name of the /ZC_ROOT/includes/templates/MY_TEMP/ directory to that of the template directory you are using for your Zen Cart shop

Step 4: Edit WordPress File

For older versions of WordPress, you may need to edit the /wp-include/template-loader.php file. Open the file in a text editor and replace all exit; with return;. However, you may not need this for the newer versions of WordPress. WordPress 2.3.1 can work without this modification. First, try without this modification.

Step 5: Edit Zen Cart File

You also need to edit another file in the Zen Cart installation. Open the /includes/extra_configures/wordpress-config.php file under the Zen Cart installation folder and find the following line:

define ('ABSPATH','/var/www/vhost/example.com/public_html/blog/');

Type the appropriate WordPress path, that is, /home/username/public_html/blog/. The above line will look like this:

define ('ABSPATH','/home/public_html/blog/');

If you are trying it on Windows, you may need to put the absolute path, as in, e:/www/blog.

Step 6: Configure Sideboxes from Layout Boxes Controller

Once the file modifications have been done, login to the Zen Cart administration panel. Go to Tools | Layout Boxes Controller. The screen will notify you that some new sideboxes-wp_cats.php, wp_archives.php, wp_pages.php, wp_links.php, and wp_sidebar.php-have been found. To use these sidebars, click on the reset button at the bottom. To show these sideboxes on your Zen Cart shop, click on the sidebar and change its left/right column status.

Step 7: Test your Integration

Now, it’s your time to see how the Zen Cart and WordPress integration works. Point your browser to your Zen Cart shop, that is, http://yourdomain.com/shop/. If everything is okay, you will find the screen as shown in the following screenshot:

If the ABSPATH value in wordpress-config.php file is not entered appropriately, you will get a message saying that wp-config.php file in a particular path is not found. In that case, edit the wordpress-config.php file and enter the correct path to the WordPress installation.

Note that a left sidebox named Blog Sidebar is shown in your Zen Cart shop. You will find links to pages in the blog, links to archives, and links to categories. Click on a link and that category, archive or page will be displayed.

You may be disappointed when you look at the result because the whole WordPress page with headers, footers, and sidebars is displayed. If you have some knowledge of customizing WordPress themes, you can work out a nice solution by removing the header, the footer, and the sidebar from the theme layout.

For learning WordPress theming, check the excellent tutorials at www.wordpress.org. You can also read WordPress Themes, published by Packt.

WordPress and Zen Cart Installed in the Same Directory

You can also install WordPress and Zen Cart in the same directory. In such a case, install Zen Cart first. Configure it for normal use, and then proceed with the installation of WordPress. For example, if your Zen Cart installation is in /public_html/shop/, then WordPress will also be installed at /public_html/shop/. First, download the WordPress installation package, unzip it, and upload all files, except index.php.

After uploading the files to the Zen Cart directory, i.e. /public_html/blog/, change the access permission of these to 777. Now, point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/shop/wp-admin/setup-config.php. The installation wizard for WordPress will be displayed. Follow the instructions of the wizard and provide the necessary information. Once all information is made available, WordPress will be installed.

Now, follow Steps 2 to 7 as described in the previous section. In this case, the paths to Zen Cart and WordPress will be same.

Zencart vs. Magento: Leading Two Open Source Shopping Cart Platforms

2009-03-09T06:08:00.001-07:00

Although there are tons of popular online shopping carts out there: opencart, oscommerce, prestashop, etc. However, anyone who is involved with an online shopping cart and was considering open source solutions probably stumbled upon two major ecommerce providers: ZenCart and Magento Commerce. ZenCart is an evolving and older shopping cart with roots in osCommerce, while Magento Commerce is a newcomer to this category written from scratch on top of the new Zend Framework.

Magento

Magento is a brand new (about a year old as of writing this article) and it is now beginning to see community and developer adoption. Magento is written on top of PHP5 and Zend Framework. Magento was developed from scratch and in an object oriented manner on top of the new Zend Framework. Therefore, it is expected to have better extendibility options for developers and much better module/plugin management consules in the back-end however will probably come at the expense of instability in the short term. Magento’s templates out of the box look sharp and eye candy. Its creator definitely placed an emphasis on the way it’s admin panel feels & looks and the way its demo templates look & feel. Additionally, almost all aspects of the UI feels a lot more like Web 2.0 with many AJAX features and many time saving UI features.

One of the biggest downsides to Magento is its current speed since it lacks an effort in optimizing its DB and overall structure. Hence, it is relatively heavy and requires a bit of advanced know-how when installing and setting it up. It’s forums seem to be gaining traction with developers and many developers say that once you migrate a store to Magento you will never look back.

Magento bottom line: While it is definitely a matter of time until we see the real value, Magento does seem to have some advantages over any other open source eCommerce system. Merely the fact that it was developed from scratch recently means that a whole lot of best practices are thought of right of the bat instead of showing as an after thought (which we as developers have to deal with it). Nevertheless, Magento’s forums indicate that the product has yet to have reached maturity. If you are ok with somewhat unstable solution and looking for the absolute cutting edge shopping cart Magento is for you!

ZenCart

This is a great open source shopping cart that can power almost any size eCommerce sites. We have successfully used ZenCart for sites offering 20 products all the way up to tens of thousands of products and variations (which by the way is connected to a POS and kept up to date to the minute). Since its fork from osCommerce ZenCart has gone through extensive development and now offers much broader extendibility and robust template system. Some of the underlying systems that make this shopping cart so robust are: template system, initialization system, object autoloaders, plugins a-la observer design pattern, flexible and extendible configuration system, and more.

One of the biggest disadvantages for ZenCart is that all these great systems were built on top and in an after thought to an existing platform. Hence, there are many dependencies and the learning curve for professional grade customization and development is steep. For example, one of the tasks that current core developers are working on is to transform additional functions to object oriented design, in other words, they are still trying to get rid of the spaghetti code left from the osCommerce days.

Nevertheless, ZenCart is a true workhorse that has proven itself many times and with hundreds of thousands of stores world wide. In fact, it has excellent support for multiple languages and multiple currencies stores.

One more thing that ZenCart excels in when the right modules and the right setup is applied is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Once setup correctly, ZenCart is one of the most SEO friendly stores out there. I have seen multiple times where a brand new ZenCart store with some SEO efforts generating more than $50,000 per month in sales (within 2-3 months of Go-Live).

ZenCart bottom line: Great solution if you want to see a solid and proven shopping cart with mostly standard features and you do not care about the type of technology that powers it. Currently, for best and fastest deployment ZenCart is second to none.

Ubercart for Drupal: Shopping cart with CMS

2009-03-09T05:47:00.001-07:00

There are lots of outstanding Open Source Shopping Carts there, such as magento, prestashop, zencart, oscommerce, etc. However, one shopping cart which always was missed is Ubercart for drupal in our free online shopping cart collection.

Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates online store with Drupal. It was designed to take advantage of Drupal’s major core and contributed systems, providing users with shopping cart functionality that seamlessly integrates with other parts of your company or community website.

One of the key strengths of Ubercart is its design that allows official and third party developers to add to or alter its features to accommodate virtually any e-commerce need. This means you’ll never have to change the source code to add new features, so you’ll have an easy upgrade path when the core gets improved or bugfixes are released.

Therefore, if you are looking for a shopping cart which is built in within an open source cms, then ubercart for drupal is the choice.

Easy Populate plugin makes zencart over magento

2009-03-07T18:37:00.001-08:00

A cart program is a server side php script for a webshop site. Basically what it does is it provides you with alot of different options like adding your product, prices, content in general, shipping modules, taxing modules and lots of other stuff.

The ones I have tried so far are Magento, Virtue Mart for Joomla, OScommerce, Zencart, Opencart, I have also looked at Cubecart for Drupal and Prestashop. They all have in common that they are free.

The one I got furthest with so far was Zencart, especially with its Easy Populate Advanced ZenCart Ecommerce Website Product Adding, Editing etc from Excel files - Data Entry, Data Conversion, Data Management. A file that’s makes adding products a breeze compared to what I now need to do, adding them by cutting and pasting. Well well, nothing to cry about, hopefully that means that someone else can’t be arsed to do it.

The Top 5 Per-Sale Affiliate Networks

2009-03-07T18:20:00.001-08:00

These top 5 per-sale affiliate networks offer primarily pay-per-sale programs with some pay-per-lead. They will have plenty of affiliate offers you probably will not find in the other CPA networks.

1. Commission Junction

Number of Advertisers: 1,966 as of early 2007

With that many advertisers in their network, it means that no matter what your site is about, you are likely to find a merchant affiliate program that is a good fit for your website. These 1,966+ Commission Junction (CJ) advertisers are spread throughout 28 main categories including computers, finance, health, travel, and web services among many others.

Go To CJ.com

2. Linkshare

Number of Advertisers: 600+

LinkShare was established in 1996 and now boasts Fortune 500 clients and other prominent companies including J.C. Penney, 1-800-Flowers.com, American Express, Avon Products and Dell. Linkshare claims to have created the largest network of affiliates of any program provider - over 10 million partnerships.

Go To Linkshare.com

3. ShareASale

Number of Advertisers: 1700+

Shareasale.com was established in June 2000 and has grown to have a large network of advertisers mostly due to their lower merchant entry costs. The ShareASale network hosts many large and small companies that you will not find elsewhere.

Go To ShareASale.com

4. Performics

Number of Advertisers: 200+

Performics, acquired by DoubleClick in 2004, is a fairly small affiliate network with some big name advertisers such as America Online, BOSE, CompUSA, HPshopping, Verizon Wireless, and more than 200 others.

Go To Performics.com

5. Clickbank

Number of Advertisers: 1,000+

Clickbank has over 10,000+ digital product vendors with many merchants offering huge percentage payouts as high as 75%.

Go to Clickbank.com

Posts about Open Source Magento & Opencart as of February 25, 2009

2009-02-25T05:18:00.001-08:00

10 Promising Opensource PHP E-Commerce Application

OpenCart, osCommerce, Magento, Freeway,...

DiscoverProtea.com Launches Re-designed Web Site that Sells Protea Flower Bouquets Utilizing the Magento E-commerce Platform

Valley Center, CA (PRWEB) January 7, 2009 -- DiscoverProtea.com is pleased to announce the re-launch of their e-commerce web site DiscoverProtea.com. Discover Protea offers Designer Grade Protea...

Lamenting Economic Solutions: Time to Return to Sound Money for Solid Economic Footing Says The John Birch Society

Appelton, WI (Vocus) November 26, 2008 -- As the U.S. government shores up a failing economy by pumping in trillions of dollars, Americans need to be seeking alternative solutions to preserve a...

A Look At OpenCart

OpenCart is an open source PHP based e-commerce platform for building an online store. It has many of the basic functions that other open source carts have, it’s search engine friendly, and it has a visually appealing backend interface. The community behind it is relatively small still so there are still only around 80 total extended contributions that you can add on too. You can check out the demo and give it a test run yourself. You will notice that the backend has a really nice simple des

35+ Online Shopping Cart Solutions

Online shopping is an ever-increasing business online. Since I opened my local link directory web site, I already have over 100 online shopping web carts. Starting from t-shirts and ending with condoms, the market keeps growing. Following is a list of hosted, self-hosted, commercial and WordPress plugins shopping carts. Hosted Carts AAcart.com - Offers three levels of pricing plans that come with hosting included. Also offers customized solutions and design. eCrater.com - A free online sto

35+ Online Shopping Cart Solutions for Your Business

With the shape of the economy and ever changing gas prices, online shopping may end up growing even faster than some have predicted. If your business hasn’t added an online shopping cart yet, why not? The technology has been around for years now, and there are solutions for just about every skill level: you can do it yourself, outsource the work, pay companies for hosting, or even turn a WordPress blog into a simple shopping cart using plugins. Here are over 35 shopping cart solutions for you

A review of OpenCart and Magento shopping cart systems

Some initial impressions of the PHP / MySQL open-source shopping cart systems OpenCart and Magento. Both are in beta, but look very promising.

Varien Announces Magento, a Ground Breaking Open Source eCommerce Platform

Los Angeles, CA (PRWeb) April 9, 2007 -- Varien, an industry leading eCommerce provider, announced a revolutionary new open source eCommerce platform today that brings the power and security of an...

Competition Analysis for the Selection of Shopping Carts

2009-02-25T04:58:00.001-08:00

Currently there are some mainstream open source shopping carts there: magento, oscommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen-cart, Opencart, Prestashop, and two CMS+shopping carts: joomla & virtuemart, and drupal & ecommerce.

It is important to know when selecting your shopping cart what features you need. All the shopping carts below feature the following:

· Customer management

· Product management

· Variety of payment and shipping modules

· Order receipt emails

· Ability to use SSL secure layers for ordering process

However the shopping carts vary when it comes to:

· Time it takes to modify the cart to look like a current web design

· WYSIWYG ability to modify product descriptions using different fonts, colors, etc.

· Ability to import/export from Excel spreadsheet

· Wholesale/Reseller Pricing

Before choosing the right one, you need to do a competition analysis to measure the strengths and weaknesses of your business, current competitors and potential competitors. The analysis helps a business assess opportunities and threats as well as providing help creating business strategies, including the implementation and monitoring of them, to select the right tool, shopping cart, to enhance your online business.

Make sure you know your targeted features of shopping carts before beginning a competition analysis. The solid base of information that comes from a strong competitive analysis can provide insights to your product and positioning, and help you determine which areas in your market you can succeed the most as well as what places you shouldn’t worry about. And that is one of the best ways to successfully choose a suitable shopping cart.

Tracking Code with your Clickbank TID in the URL

2009-02-25T03:25:00.001-08:00

ClickBank is an affiliate program that allows you to either sell your own products or promote others.Clickbank has the ability to let you track all your efforts to promote any one product. For example, by using their TID variable you can track a link you place on page X and a link you place on page Y to see which may have a better conversion ratio.

This tracking code is implemented throughout the ClickBank system as “TID” or “tid”. The format of the hoplink URL with a tracking code is located below.
http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net?tid=XXXXXXXX

You can include your Clickbank TID in the URL you placed in the “Forward To:” area
(i.e. http://NICKNAME.phonesrch.hop.Clickbank.net?tid=REFER1).
See the Clickbank TID section for more information, however, PLEASE realize that you can track exactly which domain is generating the MOST traffic using this method!

oscommerce, magento, prestashop, zencart: the latter, the better

2009-02-22T05:31:00.001-08:00

Want to know which one is a favorite Open Source e-commerce solution? Here are some first hand experience and feedbacks.
That’s true about Magento that it is pretty slow and needs to lessen its demand on resources though. Prestashop just released v 1.1! Its in beta but has some much needed features added, but still lacks some much needed features/add-ons and doesn’t have a very big/active user community.

ZenCart vs PrestaShop is a difficult comparison. Not because they are similar, they are not, but because they both have different qualities.

I think Zen Cart is great but has its flaws and its Admin is difficult for users. ZenCart is mature. If you go on their forums you will find a rich mine of information. Modules are a plenty, skins too, and you’ll find no end of expertise to help you out.

PrestaShop on the other hand is the new kid on the block, but what an entrance. It’s switch, it’s cool, it’s got Ajax and DHTML big time… Some might call that Web 2.0, they do. On the back end it is simpler, mostly because it has less options, but that can be a good thing. What it lacks is a good user base. The forums often don’t hold the answer, and modules are a bit thin on the ground. Especially when looking at payment systems.

PrestaShop's lovely client experience makes it more than makes up for other sins, since after all, beauty is king. In addition, I feel that this is a well cared for product, with a rapidly growing community. It won’t be long before its shortfalls against ZenCart dis-appear, and we are left with nothing but positives.

In addtion, affiliate programs are a must. Magento still doesn’t have a built-in means of offering an affiliate program. Some of the others at least provide plug-in capabilities for this.

In summary, Magento is a slow dog and Pretashop is way too new with not enough features, oscommerce is too old and to die, and zencart is an adult in the prime of life.

PS
I am very curious to see the new version of zen cart! people on demo said it is very promising and their experience gives a huge advantage against others i think!

getting backlinks consider the relevancy of the site based on content and topic

2009-02-18T20:43:00.001-08:00

When getting backlinks one should consider the relevancy of the site based on content/topic, why?

Because relevancy is one of the keys for google. I don't think the other engines really look at it as closely as google. The other key is the page rank of that site, and how much traffic it's getting! I have a blog that covers different subjects on the internet today, and I've been using a couple of tools to help my SEO that have saved me a whole lot of time, and have actually increased my rankings.

For instance, If you sell red shoes, but get a link on a site about telephones who cares? Google certainly won't. You would have wasted your time. Better off writing articles about red shoes and submitting via RSS and social bookmarks.

Comparison of opencart vs. magento vs. osc vs. zencart in Google trends

2009-02-13T23:24:00.001-08:00

Here is a picture from google trends for leading open source shopping carts, opencart, magento, oscommerce and zencart comparison of google search. Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of magento in all years.

From the figure we can clearly see the veteran OsCommerce is still very strong. OsCommerce's architecture has seriously limited its scalability and flexibility. This is why zen-cart will be the replacement. Derived from oscommerce, zencart major developers are also teams from OsCommerce. They made up for the inadequacy of OSC and zen-cart has been developed by leaps and bounds to become the most popular open source e-commerce program.

From 2007 onwards, no one can ignore the rise of Magento. In the above chart we can clearly see the red line represented by an upward trend in Magento and irresistible to attract people's attention. Magento's popularity has far exceeded the zen-cart, is rapidly catching up oscommerce. In particular, the stability of the official 2008 version released later, magento's advanced architecture, a strong team to support, highly customizable online shop makes magento become the best choice for high-end e-commerce platforms.

opencart does not have enough search volume for ranking, explained in the google result.

cj, clickbank, shareasale and linkshare affiliate link click-thru tracking tips

2009-02-13T06:04:00.001-08:00

While doing affiliate programs such as cj, clickbank, shareasale and linkshare, Click throughs earn you income.

To maximize click throughs, of course, you know that you must find out highvalue content that OVERdelivers what your visitors were looking for, tracking these affiliate links is one of the solutions out there.

cj: commission junction

we can track CJ.com's click through by sending them SID value.

clickbank

Clickbank affiliates can track conversions to improve affiliate marketing income, and not have to ask the merchant to add a bunch of code to their website!

Clickbank tracking works simply by placing the following after you affiliate URL. ?tid=keyword You can substitute “keyword” for any eight characters containing alpha or numeric values. You should make this identifier a unique value for each keyword. When you make a sale using this method, Clickbank will display which identifier resulted in the sale.

shareasale

AffTrack ID: ShareASale has a parameter called "afftrack=" which can be used to identify a specific click, if your site can insert an appropriate ID (click ID, user ID) to pass as a parameter.
tracking affiliate links through SAS. You need to append 'afftrack=' value and the destination url.

Linkshare

LinkShare Tracking does not rely on cookies to track affiliate referrals. There is direct communication between the Merchant and LinkShare, and the web browser does not present an additional potential point of failure.

The exposure of cookies to browser behavior is nothing new. The industry has long recognised the risks of cookie deletion as a result of:
• Browser privacy and security settings
• Anti-Spyware program/s
• Anti-Virus programs
• Users manually clearing their cookies
LinkShare’s patented tracking remains the most reliable and secure in the Affiliate Marketing industry.

Some LinkShare (LS) RSS Merchant Review

2009-02-13T04:13:00.001-08:00

Linkshare affiliates can find a list of RSS data feeds in the new publisher dashboard. Go to Links > Data Feeds and select RSS Data Feeds.

Linkshare can also find all of them in the old interface:
FeedSynergy-> RSS Data Feed
But actually most of them are not very up to date.

Merchant name: EastBay
RSS Title: Eastbay Deals and Coupons
Review: promotions way out of date like this one (valid 4.9.07-4.28.07.)
Merchant name: Drugstore.com
RSS Title: Drugstore.com Monthly Promotions
Review: No expiry dates listed although I can see they were created way back in july.
Merchant name: Diamonds International
RSS Title: Diamonds International Deals and Coupons
Review: Good to see expiry dates listed and promotions up to date

Merchant name: ESPN Shop
RSS Title: ESPNShop Promotions and Coupons
Review: promotions don't seem to get updated, here is an example of what they are offering in December: ESPNShop

Mother's Day Sale
Merchant name: Forzieri
RSS Title: Forzieri Long Term Coupons
Review: promotions never updated, about as bad as it gets, check this example of what they have to offer affiliates: $10 Off all Orders Over $125 at Forzieri. Expires: Sept 1st 2007 (Don't all rush to add this)

Unfortunately, there are reports about the instability of linkshare datafeed files, the files were corrupt when they were unzipped a couple of product datafeeds from Linkshare

opencart vs. zencart vs. magento on godaddy: comparisons and lessens learnt

2009-02-12T07:31:00.001-08:00

Having been practiced opencart, zencart, and magento on godaddy a while, here are some comments and experience.

For Installation, godaddy helps you install zencart for free, and both opencart and magento are easy to install. So for this part all three are ok.

However, since magento occupies too much memory with my vps, after installation and then playing a while, I give magento up.

For upgrade, since it's on godaddy, I leave this part to godaddy's support, so no worries if you use zencart on godaddy.

As for opencart, if you are a php guru, upgrade is not painful for you as well, i.e. if you already installed the new version, then you don't need to run the upgrade.
If you are upgrading from an older version, you will need to upload all the new files over the existing files, overwriting all.
Then run the install/upgrade.php

For usability, I just reached payment module for opencart and found out that with the latest opencart version 1.1.3, there are issues with google checkout payment module, and some promised modules for old versions do not work on this latest one, so it's better to take stable versions.

While, although magento may be the best full functional open source shopping cart in the world, it is not suitable for vps on godaddy, and opencart (at least the latest version) is not very stable and some must be features for online money makers, such as google adsense module, affiliate modules, are not provided. Thus zencart, besides its technical support from godaddy, is the best among the three.

If you have not many php and web development skills, and don't have enough financial support for your web hosting, and don't expect your shopping cart earns huge amount of money, among the three shopping carts, opencart, zencart, and magento, I recommend zencart for you.

Free CBTopSites Clickbank Mall Makes Online Money Easy

2009-02-09T19:07:00.001-08:00

From now you can make more money with your free CBTopSites Clickbank Mall.

They have introduced some very useful improvements to your Mall.

1) Most popular products in your Mall are displayed using ‘Most
Popular’ link in the Menu of each page.

You can promote this link :
http://cbtopsites.com/search/YourClickbankNickname/downloads

Please remember to replace YourClickBankNickname with your own clickbank nickname.

This link displays the most popular products from all the categories.

2) Keyword Links for sites in your Mall are displayed as ‘Related
Sites’.
3) Category links for each site in your Mall are displayed as ‘Related Categories’.
4) All sub-categories are displayed in the right column of inner pages of your Mall.

These improvements motivate visitors to explore your Mall better than before and help to make more sales. These and many other previous improvements has made CBTopSites’ ClickBank Mall the best on the net - far better than CBMall in my opinion.

I wish you all success and hope you make lots of money.

Clickbank Ads (CBAds) vs. Google Adsense

2009-02-09T17:09:00.001-08:00

There are many methods to make money online, but the easiest method is to earn money by displaying Google Adsense Ads. Agreed it is the most dominant contextual advertising program, but it has some limitations too, for example

1. The website/blog should be approved by Google and adhere to its terms and conditions.

2. Abide the restrictions on the Ad placement

3. You do not have power to mange the Ad.

4. Awarded only for clicks but not for the sale made through clicks

5. You receive only a few cents per click and thus a low income

6. Most important, to get a minimum of $100, you need to have thousands of Adsense clicks

So, utilizing the Ads concept, a new form of high earning potential ClickBank Ads were designed. These CBAds have remarkable features and are much efficient in terms of earning power, for example

1. You are awarded with full affiliate commission rather than pay per click for any sale

2. The affiliate commission ranges upto 75% of the product price, so you can make good money.

3. You have a perfect control over the Ads displayed.

4. There are no restrictions for Ads placement.

5. You have the flexibility to display the Ads depending upon your choice of keywords.

So you are the boss of your Ads, you can customize your ads as per your choice. You have the full control over the Ad content too. Apart from that you can even change the format to suit your needs.

In summary, why to waste your traffic in accumulating just cents from Google Adsense? Make thousands of dollars with it. Signup ClickBank Ads and keep the 100% of the profits made through your efforts.

Magento Open Source Shopping Cart with Affiliate Program

2009-02-08T16:13:00.001-08:00

Are you looking to setup your own Affiliate Program for something that you are selling online? Well if you are willing to use the new and slick Magento open source shopping cart, there is a free and open source solution for you for creating your own affiliate program. It’s a component for Magento called Affiliates For All and it’s completely free and open source.

Affiliates for All is highly configurable. You can set:

    * a fixed commission rate or a percentage,
    * the affiliate cookie lifetime,
    * the currency, and
    * whether commission is paid for the life of a customer or just for the first order.

Some other really cool features to take note of are:

   1. Affiliates for All will (optionally) email affiliates with details of new orders and approved commissions.
   2. Affiliates for All provides your affiliates with many reporting features. They can see graphs of orders and revenue over time. They can view and download lists of orders. If you want to, you can pass customer names and email addresses to the referring affiliates, allowing for further marketing efforts.
   3. Affiliates for All has a user interface similar to Google Mail. Just like Google Mail, this is achieved with AJAX, but you can use Affiliates for All without understanding the details.

This is a really cool open source application, similar to which you will not find anywhere! There just is not really any good open source affiliate applications out there. And this one appears that it could eventually stand head and shoulders above the rest.

Google Adsense Wins Affiliate Programs for Online Money Make

2009-02-08T16:03:00.001-08:00

What are the Google Adsense success secrets that other successful webmasters use to make some great money with their website? Because the Adsense™ program displays advertisements that are so closely related to the website content, it is advantageous to webmasters because the advertisements are actually of interest to website visitors. Adsense will automatically generate ads related to your topic and advertise these on your site.

Just note, however, that while this was especially true a couple of years ago, the prevalence of garbage made-for-Adsense type of sites to try and register a domain name with keywords in have led to this factor being overused and abused. Ways to make money from Adsense by Using Articles and a Viral Marketing Website Any online marketing technique that involves the use of referral marketing or viral marketing automatically has a huge chance of being a success. You can also login on to www.guardadsense.com. You should remember that you will have to churn out articles fairly regularly to keep your safe lists well fed and the traffic flowing to your Adsense sites.

4 Ways to Make Money Online from Contents

2009-02-08T06:16:00.001-08:00

The content is the main factor for which people come to visit your site. If the content is good and offers some value to the readers, then they will come back again or otherwise they will leave for good.

Here are the four ways to make money online from Content. You can combine them to generate your own ways.

1) Blogging

Difficulty: Easy
Cost: None

Blog as a content model is very good and easy to start with. You can create blogs within seconds. There are free blogs available such as wordpress, blogger which can be set up within seconds. Start a blog on a topic that you like and we can keep writing on it. However you should read some good blogs before starting it. Read ProBlogger by Darren Rowse - this can help you to start at a better note.

2) Informational Sites

Difficulty: Easy - Medium
Cost: None

Creating a resource site is little harder than starting a blog. Resource sites are sites which contains static pages on a particular topic which contains huge amount of information about a topic. A resource site will contain almost all the information about a particular topic.

3) Forums

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: None

Forums are the places where people discuss about a topic or area. Creating a forum is easier with many forum creating software available on the net. It is easy to create but difficult to maintain and grow it. Forums are places where people register and become a member. It depends on people to grow in popularity and traffic. It is very good fro the point of view of traffic because members visit the forum many times in one day. Everything depends on how popular your forum is.

4) Affiliate Services

Difficulty: Hard
Cost: Medium - High

This business is great if you can find out something/sites that acts as an affiliates between two systems or two types of users. These types of content models get two types of clients- the users and the sellers. Some of the good examples are ClickBank and other affiliate marketplaces, eBay, advertising companies etc. This is relatively hard to start because it needs programming skills and good startup money. However the return is more in these types of models

Google Adsense Online Earnings vs. Affiliate Programs Online Money Make

2009-02-08T05:51:00.001-08:00

There are debating on whether or not to add adsense ads to online money make site which features links to sites which are affiliated with.

Many affiliate marketers today have realized quickly that in some circumstances, google adsense may make you more money than your affiliate programs. Under the following situations where Google Adsense code if placed on your website can actually make more money for you as oppose to a mere affiliate program link.

1. Not all keyword niches have affiliate programs, in contrast, Google Adsense with its millions of advertisers will likely have advertisers who are interested in your current market.

2. Adsense uses contextual advertising Every Niche website even no matter how specialized will face a problem, while affiliate product may not be spot onto the content for that page.

3. Dead Affiliate links caused by not quite often updates by affiliate marketing managers. Google Adsense changes with respect to your webpages content and being totally externally driven will have no faulty links so you get paid from each and every clickthrough.

Finally, a tip for people to choose between adsense and affiliate programs for online money make is if your site attracts a lot of international visitors adsense can also be a benefit. Google displays advertisements based on geographic location of the website visitors so you might be able to generate profit in countries which would not have been possible with static affiliate links.

Three Key Ways to Entice Visitors to Keep Coming Back

2009-02-06T16:24:00.001-08:00

Your website can stand out and attract visitors in three simple ways: It must draw visitors in, keep visitors on the website long enough to understand what you can offer and keep visitors coming back for more.

1) Entice visitors

Your website has around three seconds to catch your visitors' attention or they're likely to click away. In order to keep your visitors interested you need a website which has an original design and layout and an enticing headline on every page.

Be honest about what your strengths are, if you have a great business brain but writing isn't your forte then contact a website copywriter to help you with the content on your website. Website copywriters are paid to write headlines that draw visitors in and make sales.

If your site has been up for some time and isn't attracting visitors then you need to start to make change: contact a selection of web designers who have a good knowledge of marketing and communicating your message to your visitors. Ask them for ideas and a quote to see what they would do differently in terms of the overall look and feel of your site.

2) Hold your visitors' attention

You should constantly be monitoring how long your visitors stay on your website for. If the average visitor sticks around for thirty seconds or less then it probably means that they've taken a look your website and then clicked away.

You need to be aiming to keep the visitor on your website for at least a few minutes so that they can read three or four of your main website pages otherwise they won't have a true understanding of what you can offer them.

Informative and enticing website copy is one way to hold your visitors' attention. Your website copy needs to be written to appeal to your target audience. It needs to be interesting, compelling and persuasive and you need strong calls to action on your website pages so that your visitors can easily contact you or buy from you.

3) Keep visitors coming back

Not all of your visitors will buy your products or contact you to make an enquiry the first time they visit your website. The majority of online customers will either compare your service and products to your competitors or take some time to consider their purchase before making an investment.

You need to make sure that your website has enough compelling, informative and interesting content to make visitors return. Weekly updates to your website via blogs and articles can provide a human element to the business and they are also a great way to share company news and advertise promotions.

In conclusion, maintaining the three approach continually will have the effect of changing nothing, so don't be lazy and add new fresh bites of information from time to time to entice visitors, keep visitor's interest and keep visitors coming back.

Adsense vs affiliate programs vs clickbank

2009-02-06T05:11:00.001-08:00

People always ask what is better for sites to make more money: adsense, affiliate programs, or clickbank?

Well the answer is: why stops you from using both (adsense and clickbank/regular affiliate programs). There is always better to monetize your traffic using more methods.

According to online survey, adsense is the best, they pay good if you have good CTR, Lets say you get a better return on adsense, i would then say focus 80% of your ads using adsense and continue to experiment with the remainder 20% - as you never know when affiliate marketing may be better than adsense. sometimes you can see trends for example Travel, affiliate marketing may be better Jan to April but after this adsense may be better.

The last tip is that if you wanna make money with adsense, your site content should be updated frequently. If you make money with clickbank and other affiliate programs, you should write a landing page, and then promote the landing page.

In summary, you can make split tests and see which one performs better, check your data regularly and wherever you are making a better ROI.

The spider process and site architecture SEO

2009-02-06T03:14:00.001-08:00

There are a number of site building decisions that can impact your success with search engines. Let's take a look at several important areas.

Search engines index pages depending on how a site is built and the value it provides to certain audiences or visitors. Search engine spiders crawl the Web and include web pages they find relevant within their search engine index.

According to some industry watchers, search engines actually index only about 20% of most websites' content. If that estimate is true, then:
You want your website to be above average in terms of indexing and;
You need internal links from those pages that the spiders are picking up to other important pages within your site.

Domain name
Your domain name is your first opportunity to make a good impression and invite people to look at your site. If at all possible, your domain name should be short, should not include hyphens or numbers, should be a .com (rather than a .net or .biz) or country specific (for example, .co.uk)and should describe your business in terms of keywords. (Read our article on domain names to learn more about this subject.) By the way, since Google gives more worthiness points to domain names that have been around longer, because spammers buy domain names for short periods then abandon them, be sure to purchase your domain name for a multi-year period. It's not terribly expensive and makes your site look like it's here for the long run.

Home Page
Your home page is typically the landing page for most viewers. This means that your home page needs to do a lot of heavy lifting to attract your viewers to move deeper into your site. Your home page should contain links to all of the other major areas of your site. Even if you operate an ecommerce site, don't fall into the trap of making your homepage into your store. Remember that when users get to your store, you want to convert them to buyers. You may need to use one strategy to get a high page ranking for your home page and a different strategy to create conversions.

You should have the standard links to about us, contact and site map in place on the home page and every page then expand on those links with a clear picture of your site's offerings. For example, if you sell management software, you may want to have home page links to client case studies, products, technical specs, resources, blog and so on. Your resources link might have a drop down menu with choices such as technical articles and industry news.

Presentation
It's important that your site presents as attractive, professional and appealing to viewers. Although spiders can't 'see' your pages' appearance, other website managers can and you'll be less likely to attract high quality links if your site doesn't present well. Additionally search engines are increasing storing data on your visitors' usage of your site: the more visitors use your site, the higher your site's perceived usefulness, the higher your rankings.

Blog content
Blogs are a great way to add quality content quickly. Each blog looks like a new page to the spider. Therefore, by actively blogging, your site will be identified as having a good supply of fresh content as the spiders pass by and sample your site over time.

Bottom line
Fill your site with interesting content, make it appealing to look at and build sensible navigation paths to all of the information.

Search tails
Most people optimise their homepages for the more general keywords and keyword clusters. For example, if you sell garden plants, you will probably be using keywords and clusters such as garden, plants, gardening, greenhouse and cultivate. However, these words are so general that while they may bring traffic to your site, they're far less likely to convert to a sale. These words are often referred to as the 'head' words of a search. The words that tend to create conversion are most often the 'tail' words, those words that narrow a search down to a much more specific product. If you optimise your home page using 'head' words, you can draw viewers to conversion pages by links that contain 'tail' words such as water plants or even more narrow, pond lilies.

10 Steps to Prepare SEO Friendly Open Source Drupal Site

2009-01-15T03:38:00.001-08:00

Drupal is adequate for SEO, with a few added modules configured correctly, it is extremely powerful.

Enable Clean URLs
Enable Path Module and install and enable Pathauto, Global Redirect and Token Modules.
Configure the Pathauto Module
Install and enable the Meta Tags Module.
Install enable the Page Title Module
Do NOT install the Drupal Sitemap Module.
Fix .htaccess to redirect to "www" or remove the "www" subdomain.
Fix your theme's HTML headers if they aren't right
Recommended: create a custom front page
Modify robots.txt file.

6 Steps for Best Your E-commerce Shopping Cart Sites

2009-01-12T18:45:00.001-08:00

Most of the E-commerce shopping cart sites on the internet are based on content management systems, example osCommerce, magento, Zen Cart, opencart, etc. this means: URLs and pages are dynamically generated by the scripting language fetching all elements from the database. To improve for these e-commerce shopping cart sites:

1. Designing for Success

- The top 100 eTailers prefer a 2 column, centered designed. The next most common design is 2 column, left justified design. However, there is no one size fits all solution. You have to test to see what converts best for your product.
For instance, make sure your proceed to checkout buttons are highlighted and easy to find. Make sure you have contact information easy to find, same for shipping info.

2. Be an expert of your products.

You know so much more about your products than your customers do, and in general retailers aren't doing a good job conveying their knowledge to their users. Offer your opinions on your products. Offer testimonials. Tell the users what to buy.

3. Make Buying Simple

-- Show progress
-- Eliminate distractions
-- Reduce shopping cart abandonment
-- Relay error messages in a friendly, useful manner.

Single page checkouts often help conversions by reducing distractions and generally making the process more simple and quicker.

4. Internal Site Search

It's not an option, it's a requirement. Make sure your site search is displaying relevant results. Check the Google Analytics site search report. People that utilize site search convert at a rate 5 times higher than other visitors. If you're not doing your site search well, then don't make it prominent.

5. Internal SEO for:

-- Internal Linking
-- Header Tags
-- Page Titles
-- Anchor Text
-- Image Optimization

6. Pay attention to your off-page SEO.

Increase your inbound links through:

-- Online Press Releases (PRWeb.com is used as an example)
-- Directory submissions
-- Blogging/Link Baiting
-- Shopping Feeds (make sure you optimize your data feeds)

Features to Decide before Selecting Open Source Shopping Cart

2009-01-12T18:40:00.001-08:00

All open source shopping cart software offerings have unique features about them which make them more or less useful, depending on your needs as an online marketer.

The following is a list of shopping cart features that you should consider as you decide which cart to use as the platform for your online money make website.

Discount coupons
Affiliate programs
Gift certificates
Automatic postage calculations (such as with UPS, FedEx, USPS)
International postage calculations (in real time)
Order-taking options (through the website, over the phone, fax)
Detailed statistics (who came to the site? How did they get there?)
Flexibility with taxes (state, international, multiple taxes)
Credit card payment options (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, etc)
Multiple payment options (Credit Card, PayPal, C.O.D., paper invoice, purchase order, charge to telephone)
Real-time credit card processing
Electronic gateway options (such as Authorizenet, Verisign, Bank of America,...)
Multiple currency displays (Selling to Canada? Show the prices in Canadian dollars)
Recurring billing (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
Digital delivery (for e-books and other e-files)
Bulk purchase discounting
Recognition of repeat customers and customer-sign in
Automatic confirmation emails
Automated "lost password" recovery
Newsletter sign-ups
In-site search engine
Detailed sales reports (to the extent of cost versus price)
Integration with sales software (such as Quickbooks)
Security issues (such as forbidding orders from a Yahoo account)
Gift wrapping option
Multiple products options (such as color, size, style)

Online Money Make Affiliate Marketing Network Classification (Part 2)

2009-01-10T17:10:00.001-08:00

Part 1 can be found here.

If the classification is based on the online money earning types of the affiliate network, the most basic affiliate marketing programs, however, falls under two categories: pay-per-click (PPC), and pay-per-performance (PPP).

1. PPC - Pay Per Click is a highly promoted and used affiliate marketing method by affiliates with no websites or small websites. This is also the easiest way for them to start making money. Under this method of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid a commission by the merchant when a visitor visits the merchant’s site through the affiliate’s reference, that is, whenever a visitor clicks and goes to the merchant’s site through the banner or text ads that the affiliate has put up. Pay Per Click method is basically used to capitalize on the traffic that arrives at the affiliate’s site and the affiliate facilitates the flow of these traffic from the affiliate’s site to the merchant’s site and the affiliate gets paid for this effort. The merchant’s product or services need not be purchased by the visitor, who is referred by the affiliate, for him to earn his compensation from the merchant. However, compensation for each click under PPC affiliate programs are quite small, usually in the range of 10 cents to 1 dollar.

2. PPP - Pay Per Performance affiliate marketing is the darling among merchants and is also the most sought after type by the affiliates. Under this type of affiliate program, the affiliate is paid a commission only when his referral performs an action - that is the visitor that he has referred should actually purchase a product or service from the merchant’s site or when the visitor is converted to a lead for the merchant. For the merchant, this translates into a lot of cost and resource savings in terms of his own direct marketing efforts. Also, this type of affiliate marketing is highly lucrative and most rewarding for the dedicated affiliate, since commissions in PPP affiliate marketing usually is in the range of 15% to 20% of the actual product sales. And, in the case of e-products or e-goods, the merchant may offer a commission as high as 70 - 75% of the sale price to the affiliates.

A further classification of Pay-per-performance affiliate marketing can be done into two types: pay-per-sales (PPS) and pay-per-lead (PPL). Both these are very popular:

a) Pay Per Sale (PPS) - In a pay-per-sale type of affiliate marketing, the affiliates get commission from the merchants whenever the affiliate is successful in converting the visitor into a purchaser from the merchant’s site. Affiliates are generally paid on percentage basis, although some merchants may opt to pay a fixed fee. But, whichever method is adopted, percentage or fixed, it is generally much higher than the fee paid to affiliates in a pay-per-click marketing methods.

b) Pay Per Lead (PPL) - The pay-per-lead type of affiliate marketing is a slight variation of the PPS type and is often used by insurance and finance companies and other companies who rely on leads for their company to grow. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the visitor he referred to the merchant’s site fills up an application form or any similar form related to the business of the company. Compensation for this type of affiliate marketing is based on a fixed fee whose rates approximate that of the fixed fee in the PPS type. Generally, the sales conversion rate is the highest in the case of PPL, because, the visitor is not required to purchase anything but only complete a non-financial transaction, like, filling up an application form, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.

Every affiliate marketer has to try out various methods and decide which works best for him. He should then concentrate on those affiliate marketing methods which is suitable for his style of online business building.

Online Money Make Affiliate Marketing Network Classification (Part 1)

2009-01-10T17:07:00.001-08:00

If the classification is based on the depth of the affiliate network, it can be classified as single-tier, two-tier, and multi-tier affiliate marketing. There is a type of affiliate marketing that pays the affiliate every time the customer he has referred purchases an item from the merchant’s site sometimes the merchant extending recognition for affiliate loyalties to a lifetime arrangement.

Single-Tier, Two-Tier, and Multi-Tier Affiliate Marketing

These types of affiliate marketing are based on various levels or tiers in the affiliate network by which payments are made.

A) Single Tier - In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant. Most of the time, unless specified, all the affiliate marketing types mentioned earlier (i.e. PPS, PPL, and PPC) fall under the single-tier classification.

B) Two Tier - In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliates are not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he brings to the merchant’s site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by other affiliates who joined as sub-affiliate of the above affiliate marketer.

C) Multi Tier - Multi-tier affiliate marketing works the same way, although the affiliate gets additional commission for more number of levels of affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.

D) Residual Income Affiliate Marketing - In this type, the affiliate gets paid for every customer he has referred to the merchant’s site. Additionally, the affiliate is also paid whenever the customer he has referred goes back to the merchant’s site and purchases another product. Commission for such type of affiliate marketing is based on either percentage of sales or based on fixed fee.

Every affiliate marketer finds that these different affiliate marketing methods work differently for each of them. For instance, multi tier affiliate marketing, also called Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) is a highly difficult type of internet marketing and it does not work for everyone. As a matter of fact, many legitimate marketers consider MLM as illegal or something which is undesirable.

Part 2 Can be found here.

Online Money Make/Earn for Hong Kong People (Part 2)

2009-01-10T16:33:00.001-08:00

Part 1 can be found here.

Below stated would be suitable for hong kong people who want to earn and make money online either at home, after working hour, or even while you are working in the office, your earning project are still running at the back.

Zero Cost and Earning from hk$1 to hk$1,xxx.00+, zero cost, no hosting, no domain payment fees, only your electric bills and phone bills count, unless you want to have it running in a Cybercafe near your house, or Coffee Bean with free wi-fi.

With Zero cost, Free blogging services like blogger.com, wordpress.com, typepad.com and many others more, you can signup for a free blogging space, with your own name that you want, but of coarse provided the name wasn’t taken by others and with their free service domain name at the back like yourname.blogger.com, or yourname.wordpress.com.

After signup, you can post or blog anything that you want, write something about your interesting life, or even something you like to share about around the world, gadgets that you’ve recently bought, and all these are topics or post that you can actually write about.

For Zero and Low Cost input, with lower earning or higher earning with risk. If you wouldn’t want to do all the above mentioned category, and all you just want is online earning, and do less work, you can try out some of the website which is paying member to visit/browse a website, pay to read email, pay to click website and pay to search. These service is easy but have some risk of not getting paid or even getting your information exposed because you need to enter your personal details of receive payment in method like check or virtual money. Not all website like this, some really do pay their member.

For Low and High Cost input, with lower earning or higher earning. Shopping cart-like, or bidding and auction website, is one good website for those who doesn’t want to type a lot, and doesn’t want to spend time blogging nor want to have a domain. These website like lelong.com.my and ebay.com.my are indeed a very good tools for hong kong people who want to earn some money by selling and buying things.

For example, at Lelong.com.my you can actually look for those unique stuff which is either second hand or used items, and if you think they can be worth more, try buy it back with low cost, and try selling it again after a period of time, if you are lucky enough, you might earn 100% of what you’ve paid for. And if you have some friends and you, yourself, have some items which you no longer used or haven’t use, you can also try selling or auction it there, to earn some extra. Not only items that you have, you can also try source out items which is rare or order items from a shop having a dealer price, and try selling the items there. This way, you can have your online shop without a real shop locally. For some reason, there are hong kong people that write an ebook about some guide, or story, and sell it online via these type of services, or some even draw art to sell their arts online here, and its free.

There are many more method of earning and making money online, and these are some of them, and again, the method mentioned above may not or won’t have any guarantee of 100% work, but something you will know, and at least you can try to your business online. Previously, I did mentioned to a friend of mine, about selling or having a business using method no.2, and till date, he is still doing the same thing, at home. He is able to work with this method till date, is not because of what I’ve told him, it is because he himself, know at least how to twist turn using the method to make money online.

Online Money Make/Earn For Hong Kong People (Part 1)

2009-01-10T16:29:00.001-08:00

How to make and earn money online for hong kong people whom are working at home and working at daytime, but want some extra income on night time? A question asked from a friend of mine via MSN. For some of us out there with experience over the internet, it would be easy to answer yourself with this question, but for some reason, those that have not really go into making money online life via internet marketing, he would try to search high and low for answers, some say this will work and some say by doing this it won’t.

Many people are going into the internet marketing industry dreaming to be a millionaire overnight. While this is a true statement that you will be rich “overnight” literally, but the learnings and failures before this are what most people can’t see.

This gives opportunities for the con men to pull their scams right in front of your eyes and yet there’re still many people believing in them wanting to make easy money.

You’ve got to realize that internet marketing is just another business model that everyone else is having. You will need great determination, persistence, and efforts in order to pull this off and get rich.

If you are among one of them that’s thinking, “Oh, working over the internet is just as simple as eating a pie” “Oh, I’m pretty good over IT stuff it’s simple!” then you’re very wrong. Internet is one place where zillions of information are running across everyday, and you’ll easily get lost not knowing what is the next step.

However, internet marketing does offer you a lot of advantages, the most common one is that you need only little to none money to start your business, and that you can work less for more each day because you’re leveraging the internet to do the selling for you.

This is the very main reason where most people fail in internet marketing, they have the misconception that internet marketing is the easy way out with huge commission checks come rolling into you, and you don’t need to learn the way of how this business works, don’t need to put in effort etc.

But as the matter of fact, you will need to really understand everything within the industry to make things “click”. When everything starts “clicking”, then you’ll know you’ve “got” it and there is where you start to do less for more, and wait for the checks coming in.

Part 2 can be found here.

Drupal Shopping Carts with E-Commerce or Ubercart Modules

2009-01-10T06:12:00.001-08:00

using Drupal as your CMS you are better off using the e-Commerce or Ubercart modules. Those modules were made for Drupal. These are exciting times for Ubercart and the e-Commerce module.

Drupal ecommerce solution faces with two choices, Ubercart and the e-Commerce modules, e-commerce is only compatible with the Drupal 5.x branch (the version for the 6.x branch is still in development). Ubercart has a version compatible with the Drupal 6.x branch (a beta version but already pretty stable) and the Ubercart community is very active.

Here are the Pros and Cons of drupal e-Commerce and Ubercart modules:

E-Commerce
Pros                                                                             Cons
Endlessly extensible                                       UI is difficult and confusing
More options for contributed modules    Requires a lot of theming
Been around the block longer             Feels bloated and cumbersome

Ubercart
Pros                                                                   Cons
More ready to go out of the box     Difficult to customize some areas
Lots of jQuery built in                                Lots of jQuery built in
Vibrant, active community                     Still in alpha
User interface is awesome                  Not as many modules available

As conclusion, there may be no solid answer for which one is better. However, there are a few things Ubercart offers that e-Commerce does not. Most importantly, is a one page checkout. Ubercart has a really nicely done one page checkout, while e-Commerce's leaves much to be desired. If nothing else, perhaps having them both will give us two strong options for using e-commerce in Drupal.

Three Reasons to Not Use Open Source Magento for Large Ecommerce Shopping Cart

2009-01-10T05:58:00.001-08:00

magneto as the potential to be an excellent shopping cart. but their are some things that they need to fix:

First and most importantly is the initial page load. On average its about 250k and takes between 7-9 seconds on a broadband connection. (28 or so seconds for a 56k connection) The reason it takes so long is the javascript they use.

Second, Seo wise it is not the best. Decent, but it needs some work. Regarding Magento's SEO solution, they allowed multiple paths to the same page, which can result in duplicate content within your own website (not always penalized, but is something to avoid).

last, If you have a lot of products, magneto is not for yo. it will take you much longer to list a product than pretty much any other shopping cart.

In summary, Magento is not really free. Yes you can download and use it for free. However you can not use cheap hosting with it. The reason is the amount of load it puts on the server. If you try to use it for example, you site will take forever to load and your customer will NOT wait for it.