It seems that the grand opening of the new store was not as much of a success as my client and I had hoped for. The store made money but the product being sold is priced very low in hopes of multiple sales per visitor. But folks who bought bought one thing instead of several at a time.
Now this could be because my client didn’t want to put that much in the store so there were only 6 things being sold when we opened. And it could also be that we have no way of collecting besides Paypal and his target customer likes to use a thing called a gizmocard,which we can’t have because it seems to be owned by his competition.
The store is a means to net in full rather then give a great percentage to a middleman,yet all payment gateways and processors take a percentage.There doesn’t seem to be a way around paying out to someone or something.
PayPal takes 30 cents per 3.00 transaction but there is no monthly charge or 50 cent per transaction or one time set up fee. All the big gateways I looked at cost quite a bit.We were hoping his store would sell a lot and make it financially sensible to get SSL and a big payment processor.But I am thinking we should have opened when we had all this in place from the start.
The good thing is that the store works! My first Zen Cart installation and customization and design. Not bad for a beginner.
Which brings me to another subject:the default meta tag in Zen Cart and the zen cart beginner:they all leave this in place! Absolutely astounding how none of these folks know or care that after every product they have listed in their catalog there is a big old Zen Cart:the beauty of Ecommerce! (or whatever it says, that’s the gist)
So these stores all indexed by these meta tags (who says meta tags are dead? Everybody but still…).
The main problem with this is that YOU CAN use Zen Cart out of the box. It really only requires a database in order to get it going. So folks load up their shops and let them loose in the interweb without making bigger and very important changes.
Ok so having a working store is good enough for some people, but please at least try to change that obnoxious default meta tag. I’m not saying it’s easy. But you must do it. Or else all your shops say “Suzie’s Yarn,ZenCart: The Art of Ecommerce!” Or “Mike’s Big Motor Boat Store,Zen Cart:The Art of Ecommerce!”.
Gah.
I’m thinking the developers put that in as a laugh.
I can think of no other reason.They knew that folks were lazy(I’m hoping they weren’t thinking we were just stupid) or scared of their very scary overrides system, which is a peeling the onion kind of exercise. Or maybe they WANTED people to have to get their hands dirty in order to customize their own stores and if people didn’t, well, then Zen Cart gets a TON of advertising…
Now I can see why there are so many people making money on Zen Cart customizations. Going to the help pages isn’t that enlightening to a total novice and practically every article threatens one with upgrading disaster if you hack the core files instead of using template overrrides.
Yep,it’s scary alright.But here is the secret to not being afraid: you can do it over if you mess it up.Because if it’s a new store chances are you were smart enough to customize it BEFORE you loaded your products or got any customers so if it poops out,do it over!