George Susini – How to get started setting up your online store part 2

Selecting the right shopping cart shopping to sell your products online is a very important step to starting your online business. There are many products to choose from, some of which are free open source. George Susini of Raleigh Tech Web Design, has chosen two fully functional free open source programs to use in most deployments. It really comes down to several factors that include the customers concept of the web site function. Will you have you customers go directly to the shopping cart that displays the products or will you be building a site that provides information, then encourages your customers to make a purchase decision. How often will you update the content on the site ?

Zen Cart is a robust open sourced program, that can handle high volume. As a complete system, Zen Cart offers shipping order management, specials, cross selling and many free addon modules that expand the functionality of you online store. For the Search engines, Zen has built in SEO capabilities and additional modules for Google Analytics and sitemap. Should your store require expanded management , there are affordable software management programs that are a big improvement over the admin interface of Zen Cart, allowing you to manage your store from your PC. There are many templates available for Zen Cart from Templatemonster, that provide a clean professional look for your store, save money on the development and speed up the design process.

Susini has worked extensively with Zen Cart and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience deploying Zen for the Small Business

By selling 5 or 5000 products, your online store needs to provide functionality, robustness, order management, processing and security. Allow your customers to quickly place an order. Before checkout, suggest other products that your customer might also be interested in purchasing. Cross-selling will result in larger sales per transaction. Choosing the proper shopping cart software is the first step to a successful small business ecommerce online venture.

George Susini