Zen Cart Marketing

Seen this error in your Zen Cart store?

One of the most common questions I answer on the Zen Cart forum is about redirects and rewrites for your htaccess. I am going to give you the normal rules for many Zen Cart htaccess needs in this post…. But before you do anything, make a copy of your .htaccess as a backup.

Diagnosing checkout abandonment is one of the most important things you can do for your Zen Cart. Many shop owners are on board with making checkout shorter, easier, removing distractions and finding errors… But all of this falls short without measurable analytical data to track your progress.

We build about 30 to 50 Zen Carts a year here at PRO-Webs and provide ongoing SEO for many shop owners as well. When we login to Analytics we have literally a ton of data from a ton of websites (mostly Zen Carts) to use for segmentation.

I’m sure you’ve done the same thing yourself. You go to the grocery store, get a cart or basket, fill it with items and suddenly you felt like you may be buying unnecessary things. What happens after that realization is a pretty common practice. You leave your basket or cart half full of items near the counter or just at the end of the aisle or put some things back. The same thing can and does happen on your Zen Cart: customers abandoning their carts. This problem, however, is not entirely out of your control. There are a number of ways to increase the effectiveness of your shopping cart and the proper implementation of these best practices can reduce the lost sales associated with abandonment.

Have you been seeing this nasty warning below when checking out on your Zen Cart?

There is a very well hidden opportunity for reducing your Paypal processing rate that can save you a lot of money in Paypal fees if you are processing more that $3,000 a month. For those of you using Zen Cart and PayPal exclusively, this can really be a money saver. PayPal calls this Merchant Rate pricing and they are not trying to tell you about it. This rate reduction is pretty well hidden and you must initiate it on this page at Paypal (must be logged into Paypal). The process is pretty self explanatory, but again PayPal is NOT going to offer this to you…. YOU must initiate it to save the money.

If you are using your EZ pages built in to Zen Cart, then you already know these are nice easy tools for creating static pages, except that they lack the cool Meta tools you have on your products and categories. Well, this function is not missing… It just hard coded.
Find includes/languages/english/YOUR-TEMPLATE/meta_tags.php

This came up recently for a client and I thought I would share. While Zen Cart has no ability to change this in its administration, the trundicated fields for your product and category titles are easily changed in the database. I would rank this task at the high beginner level.