Ecommerce Engineering

March 8, 2012

Well what the..? OK let me explain.  An ecommerce site needs to perform as follows: Attract visitors > convert to readers > convert to customers and than convert customers to repeat customers. So in an Ecommerce Engineering (EE) sense we would use some different names and describe the flow in a bit more detail: Traffic [...]

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Major Upgrades or Site Changes

March 7, 2012

I thought I might write myself a little check list when performing a major upgrade to Zen-Cart so I don’t miss a step in future. I’ve finished my improved Checkout procedure using the excellent contribution from numix called Fast and Easy Checkout (FEC). You can read more about this here. Implement, develop and test on [...]

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Zen-Cart One Page Checkout

February 25, 2012

Our successful checkout rate between login and payment is about 30% at the moment. After our staff meeting last Friday where the opinion of most was that that here are two main problems with our checkout process: There are to many steps (login > shipping > payment > confirm > order placed) Customers abandon because [...]

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Test Framework

February 22, 2012

For the Zen-Cart tests to work you will first need to install the Test Framework . This is made up of 4 components: Code in the header to select a test and set the test variables Code in the footer to record the page opens (original and test version) A DB table to set the [...]

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Test Guest Checkout

February 21, 2012

Many are claiming that having a guest checkout will increase checkouts. Aim of this test is to compare the standard checkout process that creates a login to a guest checkout version. The test pages are: Original page without guest checkout Test page with guest checkout option and the goal page is checkout_shipping

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Test Assurance on Checkout Confirmation

February 21, 2012

Be sure to read Implementing a Test before you start. This test is implemented on the /includes/templates/your-template/templates/tpl_checkout_confirmation_default.php The idea is to reduce cart abandonment on the order confirmation page. On our core site this is currently about 50%. So 50% of visitors that get this far actually don’t confirm their order. The first step I [...]

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Implementing a Test

February 16, 2012

It goes without saying that you always want to implement your test on your local development server first before implementation on your life site. So the idea is follow the procedure below on your development server first and Once you’re ready and your test is working fine locally then follow these steps again: Insert a [...]

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Need buttons for your Cart?

January 2, 2012

I was looking around to see where I could get some better buttons for my Zen-Cart and I found this site: http://zencart.buttonsworkshop.com/ It looks like it hasn’t been maintained for some years now however it’s a great service where you can select a design for your button and then it’ll create all the buttons you [...]

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Lookin for a seal?

August 17, 2010

I was looking for a site to make a few seals as product pictures for our Dungog District Chamber of Commerce (DDCC) website and found this little gem: http://www.says-it.com/seal/ The only thing I didn’t like much was (or I was to silly to work it) was their colour picker. He’s the site I used instead [...]

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Zen-Cart Shopping Cart Bug

August 4, 2010

I’ve had a few problems with the shopping cart because I’m trying to remove as much clutter as possible and after a lot of testing it seems that you have to keep of of the options for product display switched on other wise one can no longer add more then one product to the shopping [...]

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