Archive for the ‘Zen Cart Templates’ Category
Creating simple and user-friendly navigation is a real challenge for any web designer or developer. Any website’s navigation must be functional, accessible and usable. There are many examples that prove that what first seemed to be original navigation solutions in fact bury good projects due to how unusable these navigations are. The smart and non-frustrating user interface for the eCommerce projects is truly a crucial thing. It is a very sad situation when a visitor of your store can’t find what he/she wants to find, wastes tons of his/her precious time and leaves your store full of anger and completely unsatisfied. Not to mention that you’ve lost a sale which we think wasn’t exactly what you were after when launching a store.
Anyways, the attractive appearance of your shop is an effective marketing tool but without smart navigation solutions it might be useless for your business because a profitable shop must be a real sales machine. There are two main components for eCommerce navigation – categories and visual coherence. You should build semantically proper categories that will be informative and simple at the same time.
Basic Website Navigation Rules
Check out some of the rules which we think will help you create the easily understandable interface for your website:
- Consistent Navigation
- Site Map
- Logo link
- Search
- Keep It Simple
You must have a consistent navigation throughout the whole website – all pages must have same navigation tools;
Create Site Map page because often it is much easier to find what you need via a scheme;
Link a logo to your Home page, most of web users are familiar with this very user-friendly feature;
Don’t forget about good old “Search” box that could be a last hope for the frustrated visitors;
Extensive “out of the box” navigation experiments often cause visitors’ frustration
This year’s Fall is expected to bring an extreme rush on the eCommerce online market. We will continue to witness rapid growth of online sales within the period of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Being short of time to make offline purchases, more and more people would prefer online shopping due to its convenience and availability. The analysts estimated that within the autumn holiday season crowds of people will shop for holiday gifts. According to the official stats, last year 80% of online shop customers were planning to make a purchase on Black Friday and 66% on Cyber Monday. That’s a huge amount of potential customers actually!
So in order not to let those profitable huge sales pass by, every owner of the online shop should better take actions beforehand. It is advisable to plan on the most efficient business strategy and if necessary embark on high-end website redesign. We offer a special Template Monster coupon as a nice chance to get the premium class eCommerce Templates with 20% discount. This beneficial promo applies to all eCommerce product categories including osCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, Zen Cart, VirtueMart, and CRE Loaded Templates. Additionally, you may want to know the other ways to get TemplateMonster promo code featured in TemplateMonster Promocodes Section.
Online shopping has truly become an essential part of the world as we know it. However we’re sure you’ll be amazed with how exactly essential it is and how great its impact on global ecomony is. So to demonstrate this info along with other interesting facts we think you didn’t know we’re sharing an awesome eCommerce infographic designed exclusively for TemplateMonster blog by our friends from Online MBA Rankings.
Be sure to let us know your thoughts on eCommerce in your life in the comments section to this post. Enjoy!
This article is composed by Andy Marcus, TemplateMonster lead product manager and the head of our R&D Dept.
If you ask yourself questions like that, you probably should continue reading this article, otherwise just go to our eCommerce templates section.
As I made templates for and worked with almost every popular shopping cart available it is going to be hard for me to stay unbiased during this review, obviously I do have my own favorite platform, but still I will try to keep the info fair.
Lets begin with some history. In the beginning there was Harald Ponce de Leon, who as a project leader started an open source e-сommerce solution osCommerce™. It was the first largest Open Source shopping cart available back in 2000, the forefather of them all. After a while the team that worked on osCommerce project has split into CRE Loaded™, Zen Cart™ and the original osCommerce™, therefore you will find much in common between those three. Each team was after perfection of their product, with their own approach, but the core code was pretty much the same. If you look inside you will find same variables, same functions in all three of them. Back in those times it was the revolution. Although osCommerce was the foundation it had neither the template system nor the ability to control the original layout by the end user, Zen Cart and CRE Loaded had a pretty nice functionality along with other things.
Actually CRE Loaded and Zen Cart were the response to the demands of a rapidly growing osCommmerce community, each of them has met the needs of their users in a unique way. For instance Zen Cart has a slogan saying “the art of e-commerce” meaning that Zen Cart is the art, and indeed back then it was nicely put together with their override system that gives the coder an opportunity to add and change functionality without messing and changing the original code. CRE Loaded contained the best and most useful contributions made for osCommerce, they had 3 versions of the cart, the community edition and 2 commercial editions with additional functionality. The code was partly object oriented and partly procedural (osCommerce’s boxes were class-based, but the rest was procedural). OsCommerce (and it’s derivatives) ruled the universe of free e-commerce solutions up until 2004.
The selection of eCommerce Manuals presented by Template Monster and osCommerceManuals.com makes the best value choice for eCommerce community. These special versions of eBooks exclusively contain an extra chapter on How to Install a TemplateMonster template of respective eCommerce platform, and are available for osCommerce, Magento, Zen Cart templates, and CRE Loaded store templates. On the whole, each user manual is based on a full installation and setup of a real live store, and is chock-full of actual screenshots.
Before, it was only possible to obtain eCommerce Manuals along with TemplateMonster’s eCommerce Template of respective type. Currently, we’ve added these eBook series as a separate product available for an independent purchase. Therefore, you can now buy them separately or again together with eCommerce Template. Note that if you purchase any of those books along with our template of respective type, the eBook price will be cut to 50% of its initial price.
Right now, you are welcome to check for these helpful User Manuals eBook series. Plus, if you decided to buy eCommerce Template as well, feel free to browse our Magento templates, osCommerce templates, Zen Cart templates and CRE Loaded templates, choose the one you like and you will be offered the respective eBook manual on checkout (you’ll even be able to pay for the template and the eBook in a single transaction which is very convenient).
This time we are happy to present the exciting interview with eCommerce professionals – Nick Weisser and Brian Stanic. We were lucky to know these two awesome guys by their comments on our blog – you can always tell a real pro even after just a couple of words from him.
So anyways, given how awesome these eCommerce professionals are, we knew their opinions about certain things related to eCommerce industry would be really interesting for our blog audience. Below are their answers to the questions we thought are the most trendy ones these days in eCommerce. Enjoy and let us know your opinions in the comments section!
The participants are:
Nick Weisser – web architect and owner of Openstream Internet Solutions in Zürich, Switzerland. He is an osCommerce team member, official Magento community (edition) partner and, as he calls himself, an Open Source evangelist.
Brian Stanic – the founder of The Holt Partnership, a Web Site Design company based in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England. For the last twenty four years (!), he has been heavily involved in both the Accountancy and Business Software industries.
On with the interview…
1. From developer’s point of view, what’s your favorite eCommerce platform to work with and why?
- Nick Weisser Being an osCommerce team member and an official Magento Community Partner in Switzerland I like to work with both of these open source e-commerce platforms.
- Brian Stanic: osCommerce, CRE Loaded or Zen Cart. Low cost of ownership and very good support options via Add-ons and significant amount of people/organizations, able to modify code on request.
2. What eCommerce engine do you most frequently suggest to your clients?
- Nick Weisser: I recommend Magento as an enterprise class e-commerce platform and osCommerce as a solid and flexible e-commerce platform for smaller store owners and startups who have to watch their budget given the fact that Magento as a TCO (total cost of ownership) that is 2-3 times higher than that of osCommerce.
- Brian Stanic: osCommerce. Very good selection of Add-ons, good support via online community and developers, well versed in the osCommerce structure, wide range of Ready-made Templates via TemplateMonster and relatively low cost of on-going ownership.
3. Each platform has certain design restrictions and requirements. So in terms of these design restrictions, what platform do you think allows the most interesting visual solutions?
Wish to learn more about payment processing and merchant accounts? Or are you new to eCommerce and looking for a way to accept payments on your website? We’ll try to offer a good introductory material for getting started in this area.
In fact shopping carts, merchant accounts, payment gateways, credit card processing can get pretty much confusing when you start looking into the various aspects of eCommerce. Any business that needs to accept payments on their website should carefully consider the right merchant system since the proper choice of a payment gateway is a vital element which will contribute to success or failure as an online business.
Generally speaking, a payment gateway is a separate service and acts as an intermediary between the merchants’ shopping cart and all the financial networks involved with the transaction, including the customers’ credit card issuer and your merchant account.
There are numerous different payments service providers systems available for online merchants. So, let’s briefly recap the range of well-known eCommerce merchant systems that allow credit card processing. Our short descriptions include some of the major factors to consider when selecting a service.
1. PayPal
PayPal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet, being the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. With more than 78 million active accounts around the world, PayPal enables global eCommerce.
The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. It sometimes also charges a transaction fee for receiving money.
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2. 2Checkout
2Checkout is an established payment gateways available and is used by hundreds of thousands of merchants worldwide. Being the authorized reseller for thousands of tangible or digital products and services, it helps merchants start selling online without any hassle, providing an integrated payment solution to help them handle the customer payments from start to finish.
2Checkout provides the crucial back-end features you need for a full-service solution. Its proprietary technology supports back-office functions including financial reporting, tracking, fraud prevention, affiliate tracking, customer service and sales tracking. Besides, 2CO provides you with a customizable transaction interface, multi-level customer service interaction and a satisfaction survey system.
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Recently, TemplateMonster has partnered with osCommerceManuals.com to sell the user-friendly osCommerce Manuals series of eBooks. These manuals are currently available on our website for purchase along with the most popular eCommerce Templates namely osCommerce, Magento, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded templates. As we all know eCommerce platform is rather complicated to work with, such step-by-step books therefore are simply a godsend for non-technical people.
The authorship of the above mentioned eBooks belongs to Kerry Watson – the author of the fourteen books on open source ecommerce programs – who was invited to write a special chapter for the TemplateMonster customers. So, the final versions of the manuals that are exclusively available on our website contain an extra chapter on How to Install a TemplateMonster template. On the whole, each user manual is based on a full installation and setup of a real live store, and is chock-full of actual screenshots.
From now on, guys, you can obtain these eBooks along with the purchase of one of our eCommerce Templates of a respective type. Besides, these osCommerce Manuals series of eBooks are currently available at a 25% discount – a big deal for those who put high value on their precious money assets! So hurry up to squeeze this nice opportunity and snatch something truly indispensable to handle eCommerce easily!
Since TemplateMonster is such a big fan (and even a bigger expert) of lingerie stores we decided to share a little bit of our experience with you guys. Besides, for most of us this kind of designs may be the best inspiration possible out there. Enjoy!
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The UK’s purveyor of most promiscuous lingerie, Agent Provocateur has an online ligerie store that is no less sexiest than the lingerie itself. Provocative and daring, the website’s style still doesn’t cross the boundary of a dignified one. Not for sexually inconfident though.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you aren’t sure which ecommerce template to purchase, our newly released article entitled “Which Is Best For You?” is just what you need to help you decide. It contains valuable information about OsCommerce, Zen Cart templates and CRELoaded website templates, and it defines their distinguishing features. This article gives you exhaustive comparative descriptions of “package content”, “information boxes”, “payment modules” etc. for each of these products.
This article is written in a simple and easy-to-understand style. We hope this will be helpful to you.
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