2009 August | eCommerce and Marketing News & Tips

Speed up your Zencart site by minifying your CSS and JS files

Posted in Tips & Tricks August 5th, 2009 by admin - Comments (6)

There are two important things you can do about your css/js files to improve your page load (and remember, faster page load = more satisfied customers = less cart abandon)

Reduce the total number of file size (there are many tips regarding best practices for css coding out there on the web. If you want to get a summary of the BEST css practices for Zencart let me know)
Reduce the total number of css/js files (or requests)

As I have mentioned in Zencart Performance Optimization Guide, you can combine all your css files (per page) into 1 single file and also minify(*) that file to get the best performance.

However, there are potential problems with minification: remember that CSS requires that you move @import command to the top of a css file, if you combine multiple css files and one of those files has @import command then this @import command will not run properly (Tabbed Product Pro is one of Zencart modules that uses @import). Read more…

Promise the moon, and don’t even deliver Earth orbit?

Posted in Marketing August 4th, 2009 by admin - Comments (4)

I bought my Lenovo X200 tablet 3 months ago, and I absolutely love it to death, I love the design and the superb presale customer service and everything, until I got one key on my keyboard broken and requested for warranty service… This is what they told me after 3 weeks communicating back and forth to customer support reps:

Regret to inform you, for this case, management is unable to honour you for the keyboard part replacement.
It is due the requerst does not meet the replacement policy & criteria.

It is an industrial practice that machine which had physical impact does covered in warranty.

Again apologise, as I’m not be able to proceed to absorb the cost, as the request has been declined by the Management.
I appreciate for your co operation and kind patience.

I hope that our future service opportunities result in nothing less than your complete satisfaction. Read more…

Super cross selling to boost sales and search ranking!

Posted in Add Ons August 3rd, 2009 by admin - Comments (2)

I have always wanted to do this, but never found the time for it, but this time I know I HAVE to do it. I have been working hard to help many of our clients to boost sales as well as increasing their rankings on search engines and I found the ultimate weakness of the current XSell system for Zencart:

It is manual labor work, and very time consuming. Many of my clients have stores that reach hundreds of thousands of products. It is almost impossible to cross sell manually.
It is based on the store owners’ assumption (you assume customers want to see X if they are checking Y) Read more…

Secure your Zencart – A time consuming yet easy task

Posted in Tips & Tricks August 2nd, 2009 by admin - Comments (4)

I have run Windows XP for years without any virus/trojan/spyware problem. How, you ask? I apply security patches regularly, I use the free Avast! anti virus to keep the viruses and trojans out, I use ZoneAlarm’s free firewall to keep the hackers at bay, I use Firefox with ads block plugin to stop spam, and obviously I know what I’m doing so I just don’t go and click on any popup saying “Security Alert! Scan your computer for FREE”.

Alright, my rant about Windows stops here, what I meant to say was: if you actively protect yourself then the chance that someone can harm your computer or your website is really low. Last week, I have received a message from a user on Zencart forum asking me this:

Hi yellow can you explain what is going on with hundreds and hundreds of zen cart stores ? If you read my6 thread possible hack in the security section you will see what i mean. This is getting worse aswell.

BTW, if you haven’t known yet, I go by the nick yellow1912 on Zencart forum.

Below is the rest of our conversation: Read more…

Add your url to the content people copy from you – great for SEO

Posted in SEO Tips August 1st, 2009 by admin - Comments (6)

The number one signal that search engines use to determine how relevant your site is, and therefore how high your site ranks, is the number and quality of links that link back to your site. Tracer automatically adds a link back to your site when content is copied and pasted. When your content is pasted onto a blog, Twitter, or another web site it has a direct impact on your search ranking.

By seeing what words and phrases users are copying from your site you can better understand how you might select your keywords, meta-tags, tags, and even AdWords.

Also, Tynt.com is an increasingly popular place for people to find interesting web sites and content and generates visits to your site when content is copied. (Read more: http://tracer.tynt.com/features-and-benefits-of-tracer#ixzz0MzVttmTd)

A Screen Shot of Tynt's Analytics dashboard

You just have to place one single of line of Javascript on your web pages, and whenever a copy action occurs, Tynt’s software tracks it, records it in your Tynt analytics and places a link back to your site in the “pasted” version, all done automatically. While some people will still remove that link manually, the automatically added link makes it easier for attributors who want to give you back links (credit links) to do so. As your content flies around the web, so will your links.

Try it to day at http://tynt.com/

(By the way, I have just installed Tynt on our blog and site as well)

Design an online store with hundreds of thousands of products

Posted in Web design's Tips,eCommerce August 1st, 2009 by admin - Comments (2)

Recently we have been working with zencart stores that have thousands of products with over a hundred categories and sub categories. We have also seen other zencart stores with more than 100000 products, pretty amazing right? The dilemma is how to present these products and categories in a user friendly way yet still allow search engines to index them well (remember: search engines don’t necessarily index all your links especially if you have too many links and if they are too “deep” in the level. (By levels, I mean something like this: site.com/level1/level2/level3/…. If you are using the default zencart you won’t have this type of link, but if you use some Zencart SEO URL such as Simple Seo Url(SSU) you do have the ability to create links with levels like that. By default SSU uses only 2 level which is really good).

You can put products in multiple levels of categories, allowing users to drill down to the exact category that contain the products they want.
Cons: too many levels will drive the users nuts and you will your your sales. Also, search engines will more than likely ignore many of your product links or update them very slowly.
You can put reduce the category levels, but then you will end up having too many top level categories or putting too many products in one category.
Cons: too confusing and inconvenient for users to easily locate their products (zencart’s search happens to be NOT the best search one can have). Read more…

Lethaldiesel – our latest zencart project with all the bells and whistles

Posted in Projects August 1st, 2009 by admin - Comments (1)

We have finally finished a whole new look for Lethaldiesel, this is the second Zencart Customization project we have done for Jonas at LethalPerformance. Be patient while we are working on the new design of our home page (if you haven’t seen it yet, you should check it out, much cleaner and more elegant design) and we will share all the cool new features and smart conversion tricks we used on this latest project. In the mean time, you can pay LethalDiesel a visit and enjoy the new “evil” look it sports!

Best wishes to Jonas and his business!

Speed up your website with CSS Sprite

Posted in Web design's Tips August 1st, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

First, let us look at reasons that may cause a website to load too slow on the users’ ends:

1. The server has to process too many things before sending back the output to the user’s browser: in this case we have to optimize the server’s process. By the way, if your Zencart is slow, have a look at our Zencart Speed Up Guide.

2. The user’s Internet connection is too slow or your page’s size is too big (over 1MB for example): we will have to reduce your total page size as much as possible, that including using less images, flashes, and minify and compress your css and javascript. You can check the above guide for some ideas.

3. The page makes too many requests: if you have 10 images on the page, 5 background image, 5 css and 5 javascript files then the browser has to make at least a total of 25 requests to the server just to load the page. This whole process will obviously slow down the users’ load speed and increase the load on your server. Read more…

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