Posted in Zencart February 7th, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment
(You can read the first part of Best Practices in Shopping Cart Design here)
Too much candy can distract the eye
When planning the overall design or theme of your site try to keep things somewhat low key, too much eye candy will pull your visitors attention away from the actual products you are promoting. Try to avoid extensive use of flash animations, JavaScript effects, video and sound. A simple header logo along with graphics introducing special offers or discounts should be plenty for the actual store front. The only place the on-line shopping cart can be graphics heavy is within the actual product information pages, here the rule of thumb is the more pictures the better. If your store visitor spends time looking at a good selection of images for a product then they are being forced to concentrate upon it, a single picture can be viewed and dismissed in a split second. Add an image gallery for the product, with suitable image navigation and your customer is effectively locked into that product for the time they spend browsing the images.
Here is an example of an on-line store which uses a simple theme which does not cause the visitor to lose focus on the products:
Posted in Projects February 2nd, 2009 by admin - Comments (1)
Our latest project was to build a store using Zencart where customers can buy GiftCards for local stores, and they will be able to print those GiftCards and redeem at those stores.
The features we delivered:
1. A random 16 digit key automatically generated for each GC purchased.
2. The card is available for use only after the payment is made (if payment is made by check/money order then the card is not available until the check/money order is cashed in).
3. The 16 digit key will be printed on the GiftCard of the specific store, which customer can then print out for use.
4. Customers can track the GiftCards they have purchased so far, as well as the status of each card.
5. Local store owners can track the use of the GiftCard, they can also mark the cards as “redeemed” when the customer uses it.
All of this was done without modifying Zencart core code, thus allowing the store owner to easily upgrade in the future. This also demonstrate the capability and flexibility of Zencart to do things you never think it can do.
Posted in eCommerce February 2nd, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment
An Overview
There can be no doubt that on-line sales are the fastest growing facet of the retail marketplace. More and more people are becoming competent internet users; this provides an ever increasing number of potential customers for an on-line retail store. Newcomers to the on-line sales arena could be forgiven for thinking that this is a simple business model to adopt, simply put up a storefront and sit back and wait for sales right? Wrong, establishing an effective on-line store requires careful planning, and this document aims to introduce the key issues faced by new store owners.
