Ecommerce Website Disign For Your Online Business

As a retailer you will need to learn the proper ecommerce website design and layout, and a shopping cart. Customers must have a way to purchase the products you are offering. Your shopping cart software will control the look and feel of your site. There are two very popular open-source shopping carts available for download; Zen-Cart and osCommerce. Of course there are others but we discourage the use of those modules as they are much harder to modify and customize to fit your needs. The choice is yours to make but this article will only cover information on using either Zen-Cart or osCommerce. To help you choose the shopping cart software that best matches your needs, here is a comparison of the two:

osCommerce Zen-Cart Free YES YES Unlimited Products YES YES Supports SSL YES YES Edit Products YES YES Edit Customers YES YES Admin Can Edit Products In Order NO YES Spreadsheet Database Upload NO NO Product Attributes YES YES Multiple Product Images NO YES Coupons NO YES Different Pricing Per Customer Groups NO YES Graphic Template System NO YES Live Shipping Quotes YES YES Google Checkout Pre-installed NO NO Paypal YES YES Paypal Pro NO NO Content Management System for Informational Pages NO YES SEO Tools for meta tags and URLs NO YES One Page Checkout NO NO Multi-Lingual Support YES YES Multi-Currency Support YES YES Multi-Store Support NO NO Web Hosting Requirements Shared Shared Our Overall Opinion from 1 - 10 7 9

Once you have chosen the platform you want to use you can visit the link under “Shopping Carts” on WebPalPro. You can then download the zip file to your computer, log onto your cPanel, visit File Manager, and upload the zip file. Once the file is uploaded (be patient as this will take 20-30 minutes), you need to select the file by placing a check in the checkbox next to the file you uploaded and click the “Extract” button. This will unzip all the files and prepare them for modification. Once the files are unzipped you are going to need to move them around just a little on your server. This sounds more complicated than it is. Just follow these steps exactly and you will have all the files in the correct directory. You should now see a folder with the same name as the zip file:

1. Double click the Folder Named Zen-Cart (may be followed by the version number or other information)
2. You will see several folders and files
3. Click “Select All” right above the list of files and folders
4. Click the cPanel Copy Icon
5. A popup window will appear and prompt you to enter the location to copy the files
6. Enter /public_html/yourdomain.com or /public_html/ if you only have one site
7. Press the Copy button

Your files have been moved and you are ready to proceed! Now return to your cPanel and click on MySQL Databases. Here you will create the database your shopping cart will use. The steps are all onscreen. You will choose a database name, create a user, and assign the user all privileges to the database. Now you are ready to install the shopping cart. For Zen- Cart type www.yourdomain.com/zc_install into your browser and follow the onscreen instruction. (Be sure to change the yourdomain to your actual domain you have purchased). For osCommerce type http://www. yourdomain.com/catalog/install/, click the install button, and follow the onscreen instructions. You now have a shopping cart! Since this is not a Zen-Cart or osCommerce manual we are not going to get into all the details of using either cart. Both provide free online support and you should use those forums to gain as much knowledge as possible. We will, however, cover a few of the basics for Zen-Cart. If you need more information about osCommerce you can access the documentation file by typing www.yourdomain. com/doumentation.pdf into your browser. This will lead you to a 114 page manual on installing, using, and modifying osCommerce. We hope this is been helpful to those who are beginners at ecommerce website design and layout.