Evolving from your existing non-E-Commerce website.

       

Articles

Or, I might need to rephrase the title: Evolving "OR Scraping and Start Anew" From Your Existing Non-E-Commerce Website.

Have you ever been in this situation?

Somebody asked you: "Hey, have you got a website for your company?"

And you were like, "Umm... yes"

And he was: "Cool, let me have a look"

Then you start hesitating.

I have been there.

This was my very first website, for a printing business I run back in Indonesia: http://www.printpalprinting.com/ I still keep that website and pay the hosting fee annually, just for the fun of keeping it.

My smart way of avoiding that question was: "Oh it is a b2b website, I only show the content to my printing clients" to prevent them from seeing further. Now since that is already a past, here are the username and password: "test", and (guess) "test" you can try them out.

But even as simple as that, that crappy site of mine still got its functionality. I used that site to calculate the printing cost of my clients' jobs.

Now that was the point I wanted to focus on: Functionality.

 

Adding Functionalities to your site -> Make It Work!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having only a "brochure site" for your company AS LONG as it does not look like an "online" version of your paper brochure. Web applications can offer a lot more than that, and by not using them you lost a lot of corners in your competition already.

What Functionalities can I add to my site?

We are talking about endless possibilities here. But as a simple guidelines, pick functionalities that are currently available in your offline version of your business.

If you have (or planning to have) a customer loyalty rewards scheme in your store, do so in your website.

If you generally asked your customers if they want to purchase other products after they made payment, add the Amazon-like Cross Sell or Better Together functionality in your website.

After you found all the functionalities you want to be included in your site, you can start writing them down.

Only when you have that in written you can try to work a way out on how to add these functionalities. Afterwards, you can consult to me or post a question in Zen-Cart™ forum to ask whether Zen-Cart™ can be used to support these functionalities. Most of the time you will find that there are already module contributions to get Zen-Cart™ working with those you were looking for.

Okay I got it now, now I have (rough) estimation of the system I want to turn my site into, what next?

It depends on how much time, effort, and money you can afford to put in order to realise that goal. If you have more weight on "time" and "effort" side, I highly suggest you learn a bit about Zen-Cart™, try to install it in your local computer, and play around with it. You can get a download from here. If you have anything you need to know, you may contact me from the forum (my username is Jaycode there) or drop me a message.

If you prefer I work everything for you, feel free to ask me for my quote from this offer job page. Select the option "develop me a new site" and write down the functionalities you are looking for in the comments area and I will get back to you as soon as possible. The cost may vary depends on the size of the project and whether I have already done similar project in the past (so I can reuse some of the works I have done).

When you have your Zen-Cart™ site ready, or have already played with it, you can read my further articles for Zen-Cart™ Shop Owners