Zencart « eCommerce and Marketing News & Tips

Regarding Zencart’s cross sell module

Posted in Add Ons February 17th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

We have received reports that many people are having problem with the module not being compatible with the new version of Module Manager, this is to be expected and we are deeply sorry for the inconvenience. A new version has been posted under the support thread of this module, and if all go well we will post it to download section soon.

We will be working on a new xsell module that will suggest related products automatically, so if you have any suggestion or features that you want please let us know now.

Sincerely yours,

Rubik Team

Exclude zenid query parameter from your Google Analytics to get better site reports

Posted in SEO Tips, Tips & Tricks January 31st, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

To track the customers and save their information, Zencart utilizes cookie and session. You will see Zencart usually automatically appends a random string to the end of your links on the very first page of your visit to your site.

For example, if you are not on your website now and you open it in a new window, you will the links look like this:

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=products_all&zenid=asdsadlkadjlqwjdascdas

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=specials&zenid=asdsadlkadjlqwjdascdas

If set up correctly, when you click on one of those links, on the next page load you will see all link appear without the zenid string. Also, if set up correctly, those links with zenid appended to them should never be displayed to search engine (check your settings under Admin-Configuration: Prevent spider sessions should be set to True).

However, that setting does not prevent zenid appears in some of your reports you get from Google Analytics however (assume that you use G.A). For example, if you check your “site overlay” you might be in for a surprise, most of your links might have a 0% click rate, and you know this cannot be true. If you look closer, however, you will discover that the zenid is in those links. This perhaps can be explained by 2 reasons:

1. Although zenid is never shown to search engine spiders, it does get shown to normal visitors for the reason given above.
2. In any case, the links with zenid are recorded by Google Analytics and since each customer is assigned a different zenid per visit session, the links then appear to be different links

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=products_all&zenid=asdsadlkadjlqwjdascdas

http://yourstore.com/index.php?main_page=products_all&zenid=quheyiuahdkjasndkajoi

(from Google Analytics point of view, the 2 links above are totally different)

The cure to this is surprisingly easy. Google knows that some parameter(s) in your links should be ignored, and it allows you to do so by the Exclude query parameters setting which only takes a few minutes to do. For all Zencart store, zenid the one you MUST exclude, and depend on the customization you have done on your store you may decide to exclude some other params as well.

I hope this info will help you to use G.A more effectively in the future.

Simple Seo Url + Zencart news

Posted in News & Discussion January 24th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

Recently some hosts have made a move to php 5.3x, this causes a bunch of problems for many Zencart store owners because ZC 1.3.8a and older versions of SSU are not compatible with php 5.3x.

If one day you find your website suddenly stops loading, first thing to do is to contact your host to see if they have made any recent changes on the server. If they upgraded to php 5.3x, you should go to Zencart and grab the patches for php 5.3x

For stores that are using SSU, we have also released a new version for SSU just a few hours ago which fixes compatibility issue with php 5.3x (this version also has some changes that should improve performance of SSU)

Please download new version on eazyecommerce.com
Please also upgrade module manager
Make sure you clear up SSU cache after upgrading

Zencart + Ajax made easy (part 3)

Posted in Zencart September 1st, 2009 by admin - Comments (3)

As an update to the long delayed series Zencart Ajax Made easy, I have uploaded and make the package available to you all.
First of all, this whole package doesn’t contain any specific javascript plugin itself, it only:

receives the “request” from the client’s browser,
decides whether the request is Ajax request or not
returns content on json format if the request is Ajax. Read more…

Zencart, is it time to move on?

Posted in News & Discussion August 26th, 2009 by admin - Comments (21)

Last year, the Zencart developer team has announced a new Zencart version 2.0 to be released by the end of the year, every user was excited with the news. More than 9 months passed since then, and now it is “you’ll get it when you get it”. Kim at zen-fu.com told me:

A client said to me “All this secrecy is very uncomfortable, this is my business were talking about…”

As I have put it before, Zencart is an open source project developed by a closed team, the people inside the team don’t want to open up to ideas and opinions from people who use their products. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, who is working on what, and when can we expect things to be done to plan ahead. All this gets to your nerve over time, especially if you have worked on it long enough (like me). Read more…

Using canonical link tag on Zencart

Posted in News & Discussion August 26th, 2009 by admin - Comments (1)

Just a few days ago I posted an article about canonical link tag and how it helps your zencart stores, in that article I also warned about certain misunderstandings regarding how canonical link tag works and how should it be used. I later took a step further and brought up this question on seomoz.org, a rather well known and trusted source for seo info, below is the quoted question and answer for those who are interested. Read more…

Move your Zencart store to a new domain/subfolder – SEO Tip

Posted in SEO Tips, Tips & Tricks August 25th, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

This is a very common issue, as much as you would try to avoid doing it, sometimes you have to move your zencart folder somewhere else, either to a new subfolder or to a new domain. In such cases, it is very important to redirect all visits to the old links to the new locations.

Below is a nice snippet that will help you accomplish the dirty job.

<?php

// index.php on old site
// Get the requested page and redirect to new site url
// from skipwater - yellow1912 - gjh42 20081213
$new_domain = "www.mynewsite.com"; // if you do not change domain, simply enter the current domain here
/**
* example 1:
* site: http://www.mynewsite.com -> $new_store_path = "";
*
* example 2:
* site: http://www.mynewsite.com/sub1/sub2 -> $new_store_path = "sub1/sub2/";
*
* example 3:
* site: http://www.mynewsite.com/sub1 -> $new_store_path = "sub1/";
*/
$new_store_path = "store/";
// do not edit code below
$request_type = ((isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTPS']) == 'on') || (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == '1') || (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_BY']) && strstr(strtoupper($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_BY']),'SSL')) || (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST']) && strstr(strtoupper($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST']),'SSL')) || (isset($_SERVER['SCRIPT_URI']) && strtolower(substr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_URI'], 0, 6)) == 'https:') || (isset($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']) && $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == '443' ) ) ? 'http' : 'https';
$qstring = ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] != '') ? '?'.$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] : '';
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: {$request_type}://{$new_domain}/{$new_store_path}{$qstring}");

Place the snippet above in your oldsite/path-to-zencart/index.php (you should rename the current index.php to index.php.back and create a new index.php file just for this purpose).

Can’t login to your Zencart admin? Here is the solution

Posted in Tips & Tricks August 22nd, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

Today we installed a new Zencart for our client at obtainingmoksha.com and we ran into a very annoying problem: we keeps getting redirected back to the admin login page without any error at all. Thinking it’s the usual cache error of Zencart, I cleared out the browser’s cache. That didn’t help. At this point, we suspect it might be a session error, so we use the Fix cache key module which save us many times before. The cache path is now updated but we still can’t login @_@.

At the same time, on the front page we also had this error (with Zencart debug turned on)

Fatal error: Call to a member function add_current_page() on a non-object in /path…./autoload_func.php on line 90 Read more…

Zencart SEO Problem – Is your site indexed?

Posted in Tips & Tricks August 17th, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

Has your store been open for months and still not get listed in search engines? Do you see a sudden drop in search traffic after updating your cart or changing your store template? Perhaps Google is not indexing your Zencart store?

Problem 1: incorrect robots meta tag

You may be a victim of “noindex” misuse!

Here is how to check:

First, go to your store, right click and choose “view source” or “view page source”
See if you can find this string: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”/>. The string is usually located just above the tag </head>
See if the string above appears on the main page on your store

The string above is telling search engines to avoid indexing and thus listing your site on the search results. Read more…

Zencart canonical link – will it really help?

Posted in Zencart August 17th, 2009 by admin - Comments (3)

Google has announced the use of canonical link tag not too long ago, and other search engines also follow this move. Some of you might have never heard about this term before so I will give you a very brief definition here:

Because of the use of dynamic urls, one single web page can have more than 1 valid urls (address) pointing to it. Google as well as other search engines will more than likely pick of these links as official link and the others are flagged as duplicated content. The problem is that we are not sure which link will be picked. The canonical tag allows you to do just that: to tell THE LINK you want to use as the official one. Read more…

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