There are already a lot of articles about this elsewhere, you can google up "build successful E-Commerce business" and you will be offered with heaps of results. On the bottom of this article I posted up several helpful links to pages I found useful on this matter.
I will not explain about building successful business basics here, as most people already know it. Good products, good pricing, good marketing, ethics, and a bit of luck on top of them, that is general.
What I will focus here though, is what would you do if your business already have these points, and you would like to fit them to your Zen-Cart™ based website. Although I wrote for Zen-Cart™, the practices I have here can be implemented on most major Shopping Cart software you can find on the market, so read on.
1. Good Design - Both looks and functionality!
One point I really, really need to stretch is, please, by all means, do not publish your site with the standard, basic template design. I don't know with the cart you are using, but Zen-Cart™'s initial design is definitely not the best on the market. So scrap it! Draw a layout, or at least what you need to show on the website, and go find a designer.
Another important point to add here is not to restrict your design to your designing capability with your software. One thing I found very useful is to look around at other good looking websites, not necessarily Zen-Cart™ sites, not at all... and find out what are the "good" design essence from them.
This is a wide subject, and I will talk about this in depth on my next article.
2. Showcasing
If your shopping cart software provider is one of the major players, chances are they have a showcase area where members using their software can submit a link to their websites. This is a very good place to start gaining your publicity, since they usually put up the newest links on top of the list.
But, really, do not hope on them, since most, if not all the clicks you gain from here won't be coming from your target audiences, since most of them would be coming from people who are curious about Zen-Cart™, and not your website. It is a good place to start gaining number of clicks to jack up your page ranks though.
Even so, before you are confident with your design, do NOT publish them on the showcase. I'd like to still keep a chance of having people clicked to my site, even from showcase, becoming my customers, or at least future prospects rather than blow it all by showing them crappy sites.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Stuff
You might have heard a lot about this, some people are even worshiping this concept. But really, all SEO about are just around these area:
- Make your meta tags, keyword list, urls and most importantly, contents containing (and using a lot of) the keywords you are targeting, in legal way.
- Make a "Search Engines friendly" XML file of your site map.
- Submit that site map to Search Engines.
That's it?
Yes and no. Yes that is it, but no, it does not take only overnight to get a good rank. Well if it is only getting the site map ready and submit it, it does take a single night. But if you want to keep your site on the top ranks you need to constantly make your submission better.
As for changing the urls, well, with the right tools you can do it quite fast. I haven't do it with my sites at this point, but will do that pretty soon.
I found that having several articles about your products / site / services is really useful, or at least making your products descriptions supportive to your keywords.
I am not a guru in SEOing myself, as with my websites, I don't really do much SEO configuration on them. I am more inclined to increase the usability of your site by providing critical & alternative navigational links.
If you really want to optimise your websites for search engines in better manner you might want to use services from SEO companies / professionals. The owner of www.zencartoptimization.com seems to have quite heaps of experience on this.
4. Read The Manual!
The power lies within the knowledgeable! In Zen-Cart™'s case, there is a book explaining Zen-Cart™ features shown on most pages on Zen-Cart™ official site , you won't miss it.
You can obviously learn the software without this manual, but with it, you will learn heaps of different features Zen-Cart may offer, including setting up gift certificates, showing up banners, etc. which are totally useful source of information for you.
More sources to learn from
On Site Marketing Strategies:
On Site Design
On really technical SEO stuff:
