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This is part of 5 in the series The Six Principles of eCommerce 2.0
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Today we look at the first principal of ecommerce 2.0 – Sell Everywhere – Be Seen and Be Shopped – and the way Zen Cart store owners can easily follow this principle with their Zen Cart configuration, installed add-ons and more. (The Six Principles of eCommerce 2.0 can be found on Wikipedia.)
Principle 1. Sell Everywhere – Be Seen and Be Shopped
Customer expectations for how and when they buy products have changed substantially over the past few years. Multi-channel selling was once limited to managing direct sales, a call center, a website, and possibly a partner channel. With eCommerce 2.0, this has been expanded and refined to include various online channels. These new channels include additional branded websites, various online marketplaces (such as eBay, Amazon.com, Overstock.com, and others), and online shopping comparison engines (such as Shopping.com, PriceGrabber.com, and others).
Zen Cart Store Owner Tips
- Shopping Sites
Submit your products and sale items to shopping sites such as Google’s Product Search, Shopzilla, Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Get Price and many others. Customers like to research their purchases and these sites allow visitors to compare prices, look at product reviews and compare merchant ratings.The following free add-ons are available at the Zen Cart website to make it easier to list your products on these shopping sites:
- AskCost Automated Store Feed System API v1.0 for Zen Cart
- Bidhopper Dynalist Generator
- eBay Exporter
- eBid Exporter
- ePier Bulk File Generator
- Feeder for DealGates Pipelines
- Google Base (Froogle) Feeder
- ShopMania.com Automated Datafeed Generator
- SingleFeed Exporter
- Windows Live Product Search Feeder
- Yahoo! Product Submit Feeder - Affiliate Sales
Extend your sales force and increase your selling power by signing up affiliates to market and sell your products for you. This model won’t suit everyone, but if you are looking to sign up affiliates, you may find this add-on useful:
- Snap Affiliates - Your online presence
An important part of this principle is, of course, the ‘be seen’ part and the way you engage online. Google (and search engines in general) place a lot of emphasis on incoming links to your store, particularly from related sites. By engaging with others online you will find that your number of incoming links will build naturally. Think about joining forums related to your niche or products, starting a Facebook page, starting a blog to highlight new products or helpful tips relating to your products, commenting on others’ related blog posts, submitting articles about your niche or individual products, and so on. Each time you engage online you are building your online presence and widening your customer base.The following free add-ons are available at the Zen Cart website to help automate building your online presence:
- AutoTweet
- Social Bookmarking – easy install
- Social Bookmarking – manual instructions
In this series we will be looking at tips for Zen Cart store owners for each of the six principles.
See you tomorrow for Principle 2: The Long Tail – Target Niche Markets!
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