1. Search on Google

   Obvious?  Yes.  Effective?  Yes!  Use Google to find out the manufacturer or distributor of a certain brand of product.  Have a look at distributors’ websites and even on sellers’ websites where they disclose helpful information such as “our direct relationship with the manufacturer ‘ABC’ means faster shipping for you”.  There are clues everywhere! 

   Don’t forget to use the advanced search strings such as:
   - “brand name” +distributor
   - “brand name” +manufacturer
   - “brand name” +supplier
   - “brand name” +dropshipper

2. Study your competitors

   Have a look at the information on hand about your competitors – website, annual report, advertising, etc.  Note the brand names of their top sellers.  Do they have a store blog?  Information about trade shows they attend or that they have been profiled in a supplier’s magazine is all helpful information for you in sourcing new suppliers.

3. Try a bit of Social Engineering

   In the true sense of the word, social engineering is the “act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information”, however in this case I’m referring to the art of just talking to people.  You may be surprised just how much information people will offer to an interested ear.  For example, if you are interested in including a new product range, talk to the people that will be your ‘future competition’.  Asking a simple question such as “are these manufactured locally?” can lead to all sorts of valuable information.

4. Know your Industry

   Are you a member of the industry association or local chamber of commerce?  Do you subscribe to the trade or industry magazines?  Do you attend trade shows and exhibitions for your industry?  Get out there and amongst it all and you’ll be forming new relationships, uncovering new leads and hopefully be a step ahead of your competition before you know it.

5. Go straight to the Source

   Contact the manufacturer of the brand name and negotiate to deal direct or through their preferred distributor.  Sometimes it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that!

6. Follow your Nose

   Don’t be tempted to focus too much on your competition.  Look at what is available locally, for example, so that your offerings are unique compared to other online retailers across the country or globe.  Also look at suppliers of products that would be complementary to your range but slightly left of centre.  Keep your eyes open and your mind open and you’ll know when a new supplier opportunity comes along that feels right.

7. Use your Voice

   Always, always, always telephone prospective suppliers first.  Most email messages will be ignored – you will be taken much more seriously by picking up the phone for your first contact with a new supplier.

More Zen Cart:

1. What do you need to start an online store?
2. Selecting a domain name for your Zen Cart online store
3. 5 top tips to attract repeat customers to your Zen Cart online store
4. Do your online store pages load in 2 seconds or less?
5. Online Store Blog Idea #3: Tie your product to a popular event

Well, lots of things – you need to have something to sell. Your product could be a new widget you invented, a line of products you purchase for resale, it could be information in the form of eBooks or pamphlets or you could be booking services – from plumbing to web building.

You need a plan. A roadmap of how you are going to sell the product, collect the payment and deliver the goods. You must plan your pricing structure, look at your costs and plan how to make a profit.

You need time. Time to develop a following of loyal customers. Time to build that inventory. Time for the advertising to work. Nobody opens the doors and gets rich on the first day. You need to be able to survive while you are building your business.

You need passion, perseverance and patience. If you are not passionate about your products and services, how are you going to sell someone else on the idea? You must persevere in the face of adversity and be patient while the seed grows into the tree that eventually bares fruit.

An online store is a business.

It seems many people forget this when it comes to starting in ecommerce.  Too much focus on tweaking your store’s design can lead to big gaps in the rest of your business plan.  Take some time to step back and look at your business as a whole.   Try to think what you might be doing if you had a brick & mortar store and your lease payments were due every week.  Would you be spending all your time on the colour of the walls?  No, I’m sure you would be working on increasing your sales with marketing and promotions or sourcing new suppliers or negotiating better deals for increased profit margins, for example.

Of course, your store’s design is very important and small changes can lead to big results.  As in most things in life, it’s all about balance.

More Zen Cart:

1. Selecting a domain name for your Zen Cart online store
2. 5 top tips to attract repeat customers to your Zen Cart online store
3. The top ‘secrets’ in finding new suppliers for your online store
4. Day 2 – Implement the Campaign Plan into your Online Store
5. Store in Spotlight: Pyjamas Online

Update your Zen Cart Store

Keep your store fresh by adding a couple of small updates to your store front.  Both customers and search engines are reassured that your store is credible and open-for-business by new content and quick removal of out-of-date information.

Updates could include:

• a new banner (for example, to thank your customers for their support during the year, wish your customers a happy New Year or notice that you are now returning to your normal shipping schedule).
• a feature section where you focus on ‘upselling’ for a particular product (for example, focus on the accessories available for your main product);
• a new banner or sidebox to advertise your upcoming New Year Sale or current specials.

Don’t forget to remove all information from your store front that is no longer relevant.  You do not want references to ‘delivery before Christmas’ once Christmas Day has passed.

Have a plan for when you will remove all references to the holiday period.  Have your new banners, header, sideboxes, etc ready to go for the change-over date you decide.

Customer Contact

The most valuable customer is a repeat customer and the primary reason customers return is contact after an order.  An important part of your Zen Cart Store Configuration is the Zen Cart Emails, the transactional and confirmation email messages such as when a new customer registers or when an order is shipped.  However, there are also other ways you can keep in touch with your customers.

• Send a follow up email to all customers or a random selection of customers who purchased in the lead up to Christmas and thank them for their custom and let them know to contact you if there are any problems.  Make sure your email is personalised and always follow up on any issues that are raised.
• Run a Customer Satisfaction Survey be sending a brief email questionnaire to all customers that purchased in the last two months.  Offer a special discount or other promotion to increase participation.
• Regular newsletters, offers and promotions based on previous purchases are great ways of getting that all important repeat custom.

Remember, all email messages should be branded to match your online store and include your logo and contact information.  The last thing you want is your email messages to leave a bad impression.

Clearance Sale

Depending on your product range, you may wish to plan a holiday clearance sale for January to sell off any overstocked or slow moving items.  Hold a limited duration sale to energise sales during a typically slower month.  Also, launch your new product range as soon as possible so that customers drawn to your clearance sale can also purchase your new products (at full price off course!)

Holiday Period In Review

Finally, review your results. What worked successfully and what actions should have been started earlier?  Look at what your most popular products were, how successful your advertising campaigns were and the results of your Customer Satisfaction Survey.

Make some notes so that you can review them easily in August/September next year and build on what you have already learned.  Mark important milestone dates in your calendar for next year .

More Zen Cart:

1. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Two: Back to Basics Store Front
2. Is your Zen Cart store ready for the Christmas rush?
3. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Six: Inviting Customers to your Store for Christmas Shopping
4. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Five: Sweetening the deals for Christmas at your Store
5. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Four: Encouraging a Christmas Shopping Spree at your Store

Landing Pages / Squeeze Pages / Sneeze Pages

These are specialised pages that visitors are directed to when they follow a link (either a paid link (PPC) or from a search engine results page.  Generally there are two types:

• a page that is focused on one particular offer or product together with lots of search-engine friendly text including a full description; all the benefits, feelings, uses of your product or offer;  reviews or testimonials; high quality images and, of course, a Buy Now or Add to Cart button
• a page that showcases your store’s products within a particular theme by providing one-click links deep in to your site.  An example may be ‘A beginner’s guide to making jewellery’ where an explanation of the different tools required together with your Buy Now buttons.

These specialised pages can be very popular with search engines due to the natural use of text and keywords.  Zen Cart’s EZ Pages are a great way to set up your landing pages.

Email Campaign

Use your customer list to your advantage.  Even those that have purchased from you before may need a little encouragement, a gentle reminder, that your store’s products will be just what they need this Christmas.

Send your first email early in November – this plants the seed that your store is the place to go for Christmas shopping.

Send new emails every two weeks.  It is important that your email list do not feel as though you are spamming them.  Depending on your store you may like to include additional information in your email – such as a favourite Christmas recipe or tips for looking after your pets during the holiday period.

Create special landing pages to use in conjunction with your email campaign to direct customers straight to the products and offers you are promoting.

Don’t forget to send an email on December 26.  This is generally a huge shopping day and there are many potential customers who have been given money or pre-paid cards etc from those non-imaginative friends and relatives.  This is also a good opportunity to grab those that have left their shopping till after Christmas for their friends that didn’t catch up with before Christmas.

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 Christmas purchases and these sites allow visitors to compare prices, look at product reviews and compare merchant ratings.

Pay-per-click Campaign

Test your Christmas campaign during October and start in earnest in early November.  Associate your keywords with Christmas and the Holiday season in a variety of ways and make sure these keywords also exist on your landing page.

Monitor your campaign continually to make sure you haven’t been out bid on your desired keywords.  Remember that shoppers search for product and brand names more often than searching for company names.

There is a real science to pay-per-click advertising.  Remember to start off small, test a variety of keywords and ad wording and set up spending limits to avoid making any costly mistakes.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your store from search engines via natural (un-paid) search results as opposed to paid advertisements.  Check that you have the basics covered:

• All pages should include descriptive text, especially product pages.  Do not copy your product descriptions from the manufacturer or another site.  Both visitors and search engines respond to natural, descriptive and relevant text.
• Page Titles should be set for each page.  Search Engines do not like duplicate page titles – each page requires a unique page title.  Avoid setting site wide page titles.  Zen Cart will automatically set the page title of a Product Page to:
  Product Name [Model No] – Price – Title, Tagline
  The title and tagline are set in the includes/languages/english/custom/meta_tags.php file.
• Page Descriptions are an important part of encouraging a visitor to click on your store link from the search engine results page.  Zen Cart will use the first part of your product description or you may wish to set a specific description through Zen Cart Admin.

Zen Cart is Search Engine friendly out-of-the-box.  There is no need to install additional modules for ‘pretty URLs’.

Engaging 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, start a blog to highlight new products or helpful tips relating to your products, comment on others’ related blog posts, submit articles about your niche or individual products, and so on.  Each time you engage online a link to your online store will be created.  Use a variety of links – don’t always use your home page as your URL, encourage deep-links by linking directly to a category or product URL (or one of your landing pages if you have created them).

A couple of notes – keep your business and private ‘online engagements’ separate (it’s too easy to get into trouble and you could end up looking completely non-professional) and watch out not to lose focus (again, it is all too easy to end up ‘wasting’ a lot of time) on the goal of link building.

Coordinate your marketing

Online advertising, newsletter marketing and offline promotions …  Look at cost-effective local radio advertising or utilising the noticeboards in shopping malls and clubs.  You may be surprised at just how effective these can be in introducing more visitors to your Zen Cart store.

More Zen Cart:

1. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Four: Encouraging a Christmas Shopping Spree at your Store
2. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part One: Back to Basics Store Management
3. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Five: Sweetening the deals for Christmas at your Store
4. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Three: Setting the Scene, Do they know its Christmas time?
5. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Two: Back to Basics Store Front

So, how do you get a custom logo without spending a fortune?  Well, I’ve just had a really positive experience holding a ‘logo contest’ at Digital Point Forums.  The process is very easy – post your requirements in the Contests thread of the Buy/Sell/Trade section together with the payment you are willing to make and an end date for the contest.  Both experienced and budding designers will then post their concepts for you to provide feedback on before selecting a winner at the end of the contest.

Being able to view a wide range of different concepts from designers with totally different styles is a real bonus and if you provide feedback along the way most designers will post your required revisions in double quick time.

Here is my brand new logo, from the designer Dakouten: 

Once you have selected the winner, it is just a matter of exchanging the source file(s) for the logo and payment.  Don’t forget to also submit iTrader feedback for your designer.  This is similar to Ebay’s feedback system and enables designers to build up their ‘trust’ level for future work.

I am very happy with the whole process (straightforward and stress-free) and with my new logo.  I will definitely give it a go next time I need a new logo or design work such as a new banner or book cover design.

Note:  You will need to be a member of Digital Point forums for a minimum of 14 days and have a post count of at least 25 before you can post in the Buy/Sell/trade section.  However, with a huge variety of subjects and thousands of experts, it is easy to get involved with the community.  (There may be a bit of ‘rubbish’ you will need to wade through in some sections, but most of the time it is worth it in the end!)

More Zen Cart:

1. How to center your logo with the Simply Kerrin Zen Cart template
2. Adding an image to the header of the Simply Kerrin Zen Cart Template with a centred logo
3. Online Store Blog Idea #6: Highlight store updates and new features
4. 5 top tips to attract repeat customers to your Zen Cart online store
5. Online Store Blog Idea #8: Promote a charity event

1. Your domain name should be easy to remember and easy to type
   Try to make your store’s domain name succinct and easy to spell. Sometimes mis-spellings are not really as cute as you think they are and may just make your store’s address harder to get right for visitors and customers trying to find you again. The same can be said for store names that are almost full sentences.
   You might find you have your heart set on a name for your store but the domain name is already taken. So, you end up trying all sorts of wacky spellings and using hyphens and the like. Going down this path, you might just end up sending your traffic elsewhere – to sites with the correct spelling!   Try mentioning your shortlist of domain names to some of your friends on the phone and ask them to spell it out for you. Ask them if they can still remember it the next day.
   The general rule is keep it simple.
2. Try to make your domain name relevant to your store’s products
   If you can, make your store’s domain name reflect your product range. For example, if your store sells photographic equipment try to incorporate the word photography, cameras or a word relating to photography in your domain name. Sometimes it is easier said than done, but it is worth persevering to find an intuitive name.  Think of what you would do online if you were searching for a new filter for your fish tank.  Would you click on www.aquariumsupplies.com or www.somethingfishy.com?  You would probably instinctively click first on the one that you know is more likely to be relevant.
3. Choose the right domain extension
   The almost de facto standard is a .com domain name.  This is the extension that most Internet users will try first.  However, you may find that your own country’s extension (for example, .com.au or .co.uk) add that extra bit of credibility to your store – and this can work in your favour if your intended market is mainly in your home country.
   As the annual registration costs for domain names is a relatively small expense, you may wish to go for more than one domain extension.  This also protects you from having potential customers end up at someone else’s site because they couldn’t remember your exact domain name.
4. Decide on your market reach
   If your online store caters only for a specific location, then including the location in your domain name can be a smart move.  Let’s say you sell personalised, decorated special occasion cakes.  Obviously this is not a product you can ship around the world.  In this type of scenario, you will find that most Internet shoppers will include the location in their search.  For example, birthday cakes Sydney.  A domain name that includes the location will generally be higher in the search engine results and assures potential customers that your store is relevant to their search.
   However, if you are building a global online business and expect to ship your products around the world do not include a location in your domain name.  Do not include anything in your store name or domain name that would appear to limit your market.
5. Creating your brand awareness
   Once you have selected your domain name (and hopefully you have a matching store name) make it your brand.  Add your domain name to all stationery (letterhead, invoices, business cards, etc) as well as any promotional material.  Include your domain name anywhere where you mention your store name – both online and offline.

This video also runs through some important points to keep in mind when choosing a domain name for your business.

Finally, no matter what domain name you choose, make sure you always remain the owner of your domain.  I can’t emphasize this enough.   Beware of any package deals and be on the lookout for scams that involve another individual or company taking over the registration of your domain name.  Remember that your domain name is your business and you will spend a significant amount of time, effort and money in marketing and promoting your online business and this will all revolve around your domain name.

More Zen Cart:

1. What do you need to start an online store?
2. How well do you know your online business?
3. Online Store Blog Idea #2: Share a behind the scenes look
4. Online Store Blog Idea #6: Highlight store updates and new features
5. The top ‘secrets’ in finding new suppliers for your online store

Offer Gift Wrapping

A great service for customers that are looking to send their gift purchases directly to the recipient, offering gift wrapping is also a great up-selling promotion for you.

Zen Cart store owners can look at installing the Gift Wrap at Checkout Add On.  This allows customers to select gift wrapping options at checkout time. The selection is done on a per product basis on the shipping page. A checkbox is provided for each product to indicate whether or not gift wrapping is required.

Offer a Free Gift (with orders over a specified value)

The Dangling Carrot Zen Cart Add On provides an easy way to offer your customers a choice of free gifts to encourage them to spend over a set amount in your store.  This Add On lets you specify which products can be gifts, set a discounted or zero price for them and then set a threshold at which customers are eligible for the gift.

Better Together

A range of promotion tools are available as part of the Better Together Add On Suite.  These offer Zen Cart store owners the ability to offer discounts when linked products are purchased together.  There is also a promotional page add on (where all the linked product promotions available are displayed together and an easy to use Admin panel add on to simplify administrating your linked products.

Run a Christmas Contest

The Contest System Add On creates a Zen Cart Side Box ‘Enter To Win’ for placement in the left or right column of your store inviting visitors to enter the contest by clicking ‘Enter Our Contest’.
Once a visitor clicks on ‘Enter Our Contest’ they are taken to the contest page.  Perfect for encouraging visitors to create an account in your store.  In the event that the visitor does not purchase from your store straight away, you now have their details for future marketing events.

Display complementary products

Make it easy for your customers to also purchase any complementary products with the Cross Sell – Just Another Cross Sell Mod Addon.  Let’s say one of your products is a fish tank, with this Add On you can display on the fish tank product page other suggested products such as fish food and water filters.  Or you may suggest camera bags and cleaning kits with all products in your camera category.

Tools that suggest similar or related products typically produce higher order values on average.

Add value to the shopping experience

Think about additional ways you can add value for your customers.  If you sell packets of spring bulbs include a free growing guide with every purchase.  Or, perhaps you sell women’s clothes.  Start a page on the must-have accessories of the season and include links to your product pages so that your customers can recreate the looks.  It can be easy to add value for your customers without you needing to spend more.  Just be creative.

As with any modification to your Zen Cart store, ensure you have a current back up (both database and template files) and that you have read the install instructions carefully before installing any Add Ons.

More Zen Cart:

1. Is your Zen Cart store ready for the Christmas rush?
2. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Four: Encouraging a Christmas Shopping Spree at your Store
3. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Three: Setting the Scene, Do they know its Christmas time?
4. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Six: Inviting Customers to your Store for Christmas Shopping
5. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Seven: Essential Follow-up After the Christmas Rush

Christmas Message

Wish your visitors and customers with a Christmas message on your store home page.  This is easy to do using the Define Pages Editor to add content to define_main_page.php. Remind your customers the reasons why they need your products during this holiday season.  They will make a great gift for Mum, be the perfect dress for Christmas parties or they will spice up the Christmas table – such as this example from Bistro Blends.

Shipping Deadline

Make sure your customers know when they have to order by in order to have their delivery before Christmas.  Add a note to your shipping page and/or add information to a custom sidebox.

Christmas Banner

Using the in-built Banner Manager, add a Christmas banner to your Zen Cart store.  This is a simple way to add the holiday touch and it’s easy to add an expiry date so you don’t even have to remember to turn them off when you would rather be enjoying the holidays!

Free Christmas Banners – three different holiday messages in four different designs – are available from kerrinhardy.com to download.

Christmas Buttons

Pick a couple of buttons and spruce them up with a festive twist.  This works well with the checkout buttons and shows that you pay that little bit extra attention to detail that your customers will notice.

Christmas Template

May be you have found a holiday-themed template to use during this period.  Try to keep your layout pretty much the same so that your regular customers do not feel lost when visiting your store, but enjoy the fun touches a themed template brings.  Remember to always test a new template in your test/development store and always take a backup before making any changes.

Countdown to Christmas

A great visual way to encourage your customers to buy now for Christmas is with a Christmas Countdown sidebox.

Set the countdown either to Christmas Day or you may wish to use your last posting date.

The Countdown Sidebox is available to download free from the Zen Cart Add Ons section.

More Zen Cart:

1. Is your Zen Cart store ready for the Christmas rush?
2. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Seven: Essential Follow-up After the Christmas Rush
3. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Five: Sweetening the deals for Christmas at your Store
4. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Six: Inviting Customers to your Store for Christmas Shopping
5. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Two: Back to Basics Store Front

Professional Store or amateur web site?

Check all pages, including your product pages, for issues that will undermine your professional image.  Typos, spelling errors, poor grammar, missing images and broken hyperlinks all create the first impression you need to avoid.

Store Review

Spend some time looking at your store from your customer’s perspective.  Even better, recruit family and friends to give you feedback on the usability of your store.  Comments on the store design, product categories and shopping cart flow from fresh eyes will give you valuable insight to maximise your sales potential.  A small change as a result of these comments, such as making your Add to Cart buttons more prominent, may make a huge difference to your bottom line.

A review will also point out the different ways potential customers use your store.  Some may use the Search function, others browse categories and others again may go straight to the Specials or Featured products.

If it has been some time since your last sale, make sure that you include a number of different test purchases as part of your review.  Is your store functioning correctly?

Shipping Information

At all times, but especially at Christmas, customers want to know as early in the purchasing process as possible what their likely shipping costs (and timeframe) will be.  Do you have your Zen Cart Shipping Estimator on the Shopping Cart page for easy access?

Do you have your location clearly displayed?  Many shoppers looking for gifts for international friends and family look for online stores in the recipients location to reduce shipping costs.

Product Images

An obvious restriction of purchasing online is that your customer can not feel, touch or pick up your product.  The only thing they have to rely on is the product description and the visual images you provide.  Quality product images are one of the more important elements of online selling as, like everyone says, a picture is worth a thousand words, and they can compensate for not being able to see the product first-hand.

It is worth spending the time on your images and making sure you have the correct image sizes available for Zen Cart.  There is nothing more frustrating for a customer than clicking on an ‘Enlarge Image’ link and then getting a pop-up window with the exact same thumbnail image displayed.  Remember to include product images from different angles and pay attention to the composition of the image (for example desk clutter in the background has no place in a product image).  Really use your images to sell your products.

Secure and Trustworthy

Do customers feel safe purchasing from your online store?  Consumers are more aware now and check for security when buying online.  Are your login and checkout pages secured with an SSL certificate?  Are you collecting only the minimum information required to register and check out?  Do you have a privacy policy displayed?  Do you have a safe checkout process with a reputable merchant?   Buyer confidence leads to increased sales.

Customer Service

A customer is enticed by your eloquent product description and stunning product images and would like to purchase several as gifts for her family.  But, she just has one question.  Do you have a way (or preferably a range of ways) for her to contact you.  Are your contact details prominently displayed?

Closing the Sale

Most importantly, make certain that your checkout process is straightforward and easy to follow.  There should be no step along the way where the customer is even slightly confused about where to click next.  Your Checkout button should always be visible and prominent from all pages.

The position of buttons and the language used in the checkout pages can mean the difference between closing the sale and an abandoned cart.  Download the report “20 Surefire Ways to Increase Sales Using Zen Cart” for more information on tweaking your checkout pages.

More Zen Cart:

1. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part One: Back to Basics Store Management
2. Is your Zen Cart store ready for the Christmas rush?
3. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Five: Sweetening the deals for Christmas at your Store
4. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Six: Inviting Customers to your Store for Christmas Shopping
5. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Seven: Essential Follow-up After the Christmas Rush

Backup

Before making any changes to your Zen Cart store in preparation for Christmas, ensure you know exactly how to do a backup of your store database and files.  Then make sure you do a regular backup.  How often you back up is guided by how busy your online store is and also on how often you add new products or make other changes.  It is definitely well worth the time and effort to backup your store prior to making any changes to the database or store files.  Most changes in Admin can be reversed easily but sometimes even small changes to the database or a php file can be catastrophic.  And leading up to Christmas is the worst time to have your store down for business.  Backup, backup, backup!

Security Patches

Is your Zen Cart store up to date?  Have you applied all the latest security patches and bug fixes.  Remember that they are not included in the latest download so you will have to install them separately at this stage.  While you are looking at these, don’t put off changing the name of your Admin folder any longer.

Zen Cart Known Bugs and their fixes

Zen Cart Security Patches and Upgrades

Changing the Zen Cart Admin folder

Stock

Check that you have adequate stock levels to take you through the Christmas / New Year period.  With suppliers and manufacturers closed during the holiday period, it may be difficult to arrange additional deliveries.

Conduct a stocktake against your Zen Cart records and make adjustments as required.  You don’t want to disappoint your customers with Out of Stock or On Backorder notices.  Ensure you can deliver on completed sales in the expected time frame.

Product Titles and Descriptions

When people shop online they tend to search in one of these three ways: generic product (eg camping stove), brand-name product (eg MSR Simmerlite Stove) or solution based (eg light, multi-fuel stove for camping).  Which type of search suits your products?  Are you easy to find online? How does your Zen Cart store rank in the search engine results using these different search terms?

Review your product titles and product descriptions to make sure you have included the search terms you are targeting.  And remember, your product titles need to make sense on their own, not only in the context of your categories.  Make your product descriptions unique, don’t just rely on the manufacturer’s description of the product or on copying the other products in the series.  If you are selling art work or other hand-crafted pieces, customers like to know a little back story on the creation of the piece and the search engines will also love the additional content.

You may also want to tweak some product descriptions to suit the Christmas period – for example including ‘great gift idea for Dad’ or ‘imagine Christmas dinner with this beautiful table linen’.

Remember, shoppers will generally search for product names rather than store names.

Meta Keywords and Descriptions

While not as significant as natural content on your Category and Product pages, the meta keyword and description fields provide additional information for search engines.  The meta descriptions in particular may be used by search engines as the summary under the page title in the search results.  Select key sections from your Product Description to include in the meta description field.  Look at how your competitors are listed in the search engine results for products and amend your meta information if required.

Shipping and Returns Policies

You may not have reviewed your shipping and returns policies since you first set up your Zen Cart store.  If you offer a range of shipping options, are the differences in delivery time they can expect clearly outlined?  Do your customers understand the conditions in which you will accept a return?

Are your shipping and return policies easy to find from the Home page?

Define Pages

A sure sign of an unfinished Zen Cart store is visiting a page and finding sample text such as “To remove this section of the text, delete it from the Define Pages Editor” or “A few words about the approximate shipping time or your processing policy would be put here”.

Out-of-date information on define pages is also a sign that the online store may not be maintained and this will also erode customer confidence in your store.

Zen Cart Email Communications

The Welcome Email forms part of your store’s first impressions.  The Zen Cart emails are an important part (and sometimes the only method) of communicating with your customers.  It is vital you know the contents of the email messages sent from Zen Cart and that they display correctly.  If you have HTML email as an option, have you updated the email templates to include your store’s logo and to reflect the color scheme of your online store?  Do they portray a professional image?

More Zen Cart:

1. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Two: Back to Basics Store Front
2. Is your Zen Cart store ready for the Christmas rush?
3. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Six: Inviting Customers to your Store for Christmas Shopping
4. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Five: Sweetening the deals for Christmas at your Store
5. Getting Ready for Christmas – Part Seven: Essential Follow-up After the Christmas Rush