The majority of suppliers can provide a data feed containing their products. For zencart shop owners this can be a life saver. However, what you find is that the data feed is not compatible with importing into Zen Cart so manual amendments have to be made to ensure the file can be imported. Whats more, you have to look for new and amended products where you have to manually upload the images.

iwebshop has come up with a solution to this.

iwebshop will create a zencart module specific to your suppliers data file, to ease the workload of updating your products. Features, may include:

• Automatically take your suppliers data file and rearranges it into a format compatible for importing into zencart.
• Automatically import the new data feed into your zencart shop, updating/adding products.
• Automatically copies the product images from the suppliers website to your hosting space.

Once the addon is implemented, cron jobs are used to run these tasks. Saving you time and money!

For further details on this service, please click here

Zen Cart Zen cart is my favourite shopping cart. The benefits to it make it perfect for an online shop. Here is a list of features, which is in no ways complete but gives you a good idea of how customisable the cart is. Benefits of using Zen Cart: 1. Highly Customisable The beaty of zen cart is that is has many customisable options, mainly done through the shop admin panel. Just about everything I have ever been asked to change a shop is covered in the shop admin. From removing certain text and attributes to addons easily implemented to enhance the site.

2. Numerous Templates

Installing a template is very easy, its just a question of uploading files. Then activating the template in the shop admin panel. There is many sites out there offering free and cheap templates. Templates are also very easy to customise, so even if the one you like ‘isnt perfect’ it can be adjusted easily to your taste.

3. Addons Galore

Over at the zen cart forums and Download Section is a whole host of addons you can use for zen cart. They are simple to implement, usually requiring no or very few file edits and by using the shop admin you can run an sql file to make any database changes to accomodate the addon. Obviously you have to ensure that a backup is taken before installing a new addon, but in the main its a pretty easy installation. Also make sure the addon is compatible with your version. You will find the developers will update an addon frequently, in line with new versions of zen cart.

4. Helpful community Forums

Over at zen cart is their community forums, heaving with developers and shop owners discussing any issues. Great place to get the answers for any tweaks you want to make but just dont know how to do it.

5. Compatible with lots of payment services

You will find that zen cart is compatible with most payment systems and should have no problems finding an addon to connect your shop to the appropriate payment system. Includes paypal, nocheck, Protx…the list goes on.

6. Search engine Friendly cart

In my experience I have found zen cart excellent for making sure my shopping sites appear in search engines such as Google. Very easy for google to deep index your site. There is even a module to enhance your search engine friendliness, giving you the ability to have SEO friendly URLS. Instead of having a url such as http://iwebshop.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=19 the SEO module will show the URL as http://iwebshop.co.uk/ecommerce-shops-c-19.html

Downside to using Zen Cart

To be perfectly honest I cant think of many reasons why you shouldnt use zen cart. Ive heard some people mention that they ‘dont like the look of zen cart’. But what they fail to see is that the cart is highly customisable and its up to the web designer to make it look good.

iwebshop specialises in setting up online shops. Whether you already have a high street shop or an ebay shop and want to venture into the online world of ecommerce then we can offer you the services to achieve just that.

Now before I continue, let me just say that I didn’t write this article to discourage you from building an online store. I wrote it to educate so you won’t fall into the same trap so many other beginners find themselves in when first starting out.

Stores are Simple to Setup

To begin, creating the store is not the challenge it used to be. These days the “development part” is pretty easy. There are thousands of web hosts now that offer a free, built-in shopping cart when you pay them to host your site.

Another alternative is to use iwebshop and have them build and maintain your store for a monthly fee.

Heck, you can even use paypal.com for free! All you do is sign up and paste some HTML code into your website and Voila….you’ve got an instant online shopping cart.

Paypal handles the credit card transactions while depositing the profits into your bank account. (They take a small percentage of every order, of course).

So hopefully you can see that actually building the store is not the tricky part anymore.

BUT… don’t waste any time setting up your store with any of these sites until you read on…

The Biggest Obstacle

The real challenge to making an online store successful is actually getting enough traffic to make a profit. After all, what’s the point in spending time and money into building a store if you haven’t a clue how to bring in traffic from the Internet.

Ninety eight percent of the people who try to create online stores or shopping sites struggle because they don’t understand how to drive enough traffic to their stores.

It’s not as easy as just submitting to MSN, Google and Yahoo and then your site will just show up on the first page of results.

So people spend all this money on a fancy website and storefront and have no idea how to make their site rank high with Google.com — which is the best source for free traffic on the Internet.

Why would someone search for Luke’s Shopping Site to buy something when they know they can go to reputable companies like Yahoo, Overstock, Amazon and many of other popular online retailers to buy the exact same items you’re trying to sell?

In other words, how are you going to get your store noticed among all the billions of online stores already out here?

The answer is…you probably won’t going after generic terms like “shopping” or “online store”. Unless, of course, you’re prepared to fork out millions of dollars in advertising every month like Yahoo, Amazon and some of the others did way back when.

Not to sound discouraging, but unless you’ve got an enormous amount of money for advertising, you will go broke trying to compete with the gazillion online shopping websites.

Big name companies like Amazon.com have spent years and millions of dollars in advertising to build their own brand awareness and it’s hard to get in on this market share if you’re just starting out.

But don’t worry… there IS a solution to being found. And the good news for you is that most people will never figure this next part out. You’ll be light years ahead of your future site’s competition and you’ll be rich if you do it right.

So if you can grasp and implement what you’re about to read, you’re way ahead of the game already! Congratulations in advance.

How People Shop Online

Most people shop online by going directly to their favorite retailer websites. They don’t type in generic products unless they are looking for a very specific type of product that can’t be found at popular retail stores.

Now that you know this, can’t you see how difficult it would be for your store to compete with many of the popular brand name stores? So what should you do?

The answer is to build a niche store.

What is a Niche Store?

Before you even build your store you need to determine your niche. So instead of trying to build a shopping site that sells everything under the sun, start out small and capitalize on a niche you are familiar with.

Let’s say you crochet quilts as a hobby. It would be much easier to drive traffic to a store that sells a specific type of quilt than to try to open a store that sells everything like Amazon.com. That way you can capitalize on people searching for very specific keywords about quilts.

Why Niche Sites Work

1) They have much less competition. Compare the results in Google when you type in “online shopping” versus “handcrafted quilts”.

Sure, “online shopping” is a much more popular searched term, but you’d have a hard time getting traffic because you’re competing with so many other webmasters who want their sites to be #1.

2) One of the keys with getting traffic to Google is content, content and more content. If you build your site on a hobby you can write pages and pages of content on this subject to help funnel in more traffic.

The more pages you have on your site, the greater chance the search engines will find your site, thus bringing you more visitors.

More traffic will hopefully mean more sales for you in the long-run.

Outdoor Equipment Shop

My favorite example of a successful niche store is footprintsglasgow.co.uk

Build Your Main Website First

Many people don’t ever get this, but the key to making your store popular and successful is to build your main site and have that act as a gateway to your online store. I can’t stress how important that is.

In other words, work on getting traffic to your main site via the search engines and then link your store to this main website.

The reason is, it’s much easier for the search engines to find your themed, content-rich website than it is to find a single stand-alone store.

In fact, most search engines won’t even add your store to their index by itself, but they will list your main website that links to your store. So that’s why you need to focus on that main site first.

So if you want to sell your knitting needles online, you would first create a content-rich site on sewing. Offer tons of tips and guidelines on this subject to help draw in search engine traffic.

Then from those search-engine-friendly pages you would link to your online store. This is much more effective than just trying to promote a stand-alone store.

Build a Niche Store on eBay

Another way to make money from an online store is to create a niche store that earns revenue by affiliating with eBay.

Finding a niche is the most important step, so it’s crucial that you take the time to do this first.

My Recommendation

If you are new to building a website, I strongly recommend you either consider iwebshop and check out their latest success story http://footprintsglasgow.co.uk

Both have generated a solid reputation online for helping people make money with a store and they give beginners the guidance they need to get started.

I haven’t found any other reputable companies that offer this kind of help and support.

Article source: http://www.2createawebsite.com/money/build-online-store.html

First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.

Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects’ desired payment method. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won’t be able to pay you when they want to.

On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?

Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects’ confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.

As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits!

Article from http://www.selfseo.com/story-19637.php

Although prices for shopping carts used to be high, this in no longer the case. You can find outstanding value and other significant e-commerce benefits you would not think possible. There are now low cost shopping cart options that will meet your e-commerce needs.

Administration:

A very useful feature of using Zen Cart, is the ability edit your content and terms pages. Pages like your privacy policy or terms of trade. What’s more is you can do it in HTML. Even if you don’t know any HTML. Zen Cart also boasts a comprehensive selection of shipping and payment modules as standard. Installation and management is as easy as 1 – 2 – 3. Even for an internet novice. The layout settings in Zen Cart’s admin section allow you to spotlight listings as ’special offers’ or ‘featured products’. Both of these options can seriously increase your profitability.

Creating and managing your product attributes is a breeze with Zen Cart. With the click of a button you have the power to add, delete, move, link or copy your products anywhere in your site. Unlike lessor e-commerce scripts, Zen Cart allows you pick which details to show and where you want to show them on your product details page.

Some of the Benefits:

The ability of this e-commerce programme to run multiple special offer campaigns along side new and upcoming products really can increase your profits significantly. Another outstanding reason to use this shopping cart software are it’s customer retention tools. Some of these worth noting are the ability to send newsletters in either text or html and it’s gift certificate or voucher modules. For international businesses, Zen Cart also supports multiple languages, currencies and tax structures.

The built in Search Engine Optimization tools, which have an automatic Meta Tags builder. Mean that you can control how individual products get listed. You really can expect great search engine listings. Customizing Zen Cart to meet your individual needs is easier than you would expect. Visitors to your website will love how simple Zen Cart makes finding and getting to what they want to buy.

When you want to really create an opportunity, Zen Cart makes it easy to put in place global price reductions. Imagine the impact that will have. Special offers are always a good thing to get your customers spending.
Setting up quantity discounts to increase turnover is as painless as it gets. Click Click. Say you have more stock than you need, simply set-up individual items with special prices. By default your customers will see at a glance how much they are saving, making them more likely to buy.

One feature really makes Zen Cart stand out as the champion in its arena. Prices can be set, simply and quickly by your products attributes. If red is more expensive than green and small is cheaper than large, Zen Cart can deal with it. In fact, it is so good, it can deal with multiple attributes at the same time. That will make you life easier. Why not consider using the built in Customer Group Discounts facility to market your products to clubs or associations. Why waste your time contacting 20 individuals when you can contact one club secretary who has 30 members?

That’s how easy it is to improve or create profits with the Zen Cart shopping cart script. iwebshop are specialists in setting up ecommerce shopping sites, and offer extra services such as search engine optimisation to help you increase your traffic and potential sales.

Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?E-Commerce-101—Shopping-Carts-Made-Easy&id=295074

Now let’s look at this very underused method for finding topics and hot products using Paypal Shops to determine what people are spending money on. This is so easy it blows my mind it hasn’t been talked about before and that could be because people don’t know about it. I’m probably eroding someone’s secret advantage by publishing this one!

Paypal Shops

You probably know Paypal shops already. It’s the page you are taken to after you log out of Paypal that contains a list of online retailers that use Paypal to sell goods.

If you haven’t been there before, go visit Paypal Shops now.

Once there you will see this page which you can either search or browse categories to find stores. For the sake of this tutorial, I clicked the Sports category link in the left side navigation.

After clicking a category you are taken to a list of shops ranked by volume.

In the listings you will notice a number in brackets next to the name of the store. That number refers to the number of Paypal members who have paid that merchant. The higher that number, the more sales made.

The idea here is that you can browse categories and find the stores that make a lot of sales. This is free live information about what is selling well online. If you don’t understand how powerful that is, then you haven’t been reading my blog enough .

What’s even better is you can go and visit the stores making a lot of sales and see the exact products they sell and the website design and content they use to sell it.

How To Use This Information

The simple way to use this information is to find products that sell. What you do after that is entirely dependent on your strategy.

Here are some ideas for you -

• If you are a blogger you can use this information to find hot products to sell as an affiliate. You can write content to attract the buyers of these hot products or test these products on your existing blog readers.Some of the students in Blog Mastermind complain of not knowing what products to promote on their blog, so Paypal Shops is definitely a great research point and conveniently breaks everything into categories. Some of the shops will have affiliate programs you can join, but if they don’t, simply find another retailer who sells the same product that does have an affiliate program or consider drop-shipping the product yourself.
• If you are a niche marketer you can develop content sites targeting a topic category to attract search engine traffic and use AdSense, brokering services like Chitika and affiliate products to monetize the content. This is a tactic for those thinking about making 50 sites that make $100 a month, rather than one site that makes $5,000 a month. Hot products are generally reflective of hot markets where search research is being done. If you want the traffic, find the hot topics and create the content.
• If you are keen to go deep in a subject and become an authority, but you need topic ideas and are concerned about profitability, Paypal shops can help. Use the data to come up with topic ideas and find the product categories that sell in large quantity.
• If you are looking to build an e-commerce store, you can use Paypal shops to find who makes money and then enter their market and do a better job. Most of the shops listed, despite their high sales figures, will under utilize the marketing methods available to them. Use your search engine optimization and direct marketing skills to become a dominant retailer.
• If going up against the existing competition is not your thing, consider creating a product or service to compliment and appeal to existing customers. The data in Paypal Shops can give you ideas and point you in the direction of customer categories with ample buyer numbers. Remember iPod customers buy a ton of iPod accessories each year too.

I’m sure you can come up with a bunch of your own ideas that go beyond what I came up with. Feel free to post your ideas as comment replies.

Knowing what sells online is powerful information. Most Internet marketers are very good at one or two techniques and go from market-to-market applying these techniques. If you have skills in SEO or PPC or blogging or social marketing, Paypal Shops can show you what people spend money on and thus what traffic to seek using your skills.

Article written by Yaro from: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com