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

George Susini provides tip # 1 for getting started setting up your online store

Think about your SEO and Marketing right up front, how will your customers find you ? The longer the keyword Phrase the better results your site will not only be found but more specific search results will bring you traffic that will result in conversions or purchases.

Choose a good web site address or domain name. Make your new domain name a part of all your marketing, and include your new web store domain name on all your marketing and ordering documents. If possible your Domain name should include a keyword you will be using for you SEO efforts. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the great company name you just thought of will have a domain name that matches.

Setup and use your new e-mail accounts for your new store URL. Not only does it look more professional to have your domain name match your email name, it helps customers remember you online! And it reassures customers that they are dealing directly with your company. Gmail and Yahoo accounts are not Professional.

George Susini

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