Guidelines to Follow When Integrating PSD to Zen Cart

Every ecommerce owner wants to make his/her website more alluring and attractive so as to increase the conversion rates. And why not when online market is avenging in every nook and corner of the world? 

That’s why many site owners prefer to leverage different open source shopping cart platforms and Zen Cart is one of top most priority.

Whether you are getting into in an ecommerce business or starting a new project listed below are some of the important tips for PSD to Zen Cart integration.

Ways to Boost User Engagement

PSD to Zen Cart conversion is a fundamental step in the process of ZenCart web development that in which you need to convert Psd to XHTML/CSS and then, integrate XHTML to ZenCart theme, template or skin to create a shopping cart.

·         Intuitive designing is a great art and a professional designer can also make sure that your website can be used instinctively.

·         Ensure your website’s stylesheets don’t include any references to image files, especially the image files that don’t exist on your website server.

·         If current website is taking too long to load, so making your website load faster is very crucial. Large and uncompressed images can adversely be the cause and highly recommended to use fully optimized and compressed images for your site.

·         Choose “Apply Discounts Used by Product Special/Sale: No.” to minimize your website’s parse time.

·         A skilled PSD conversion developer can easily convert entire template and optimize it extensively.

·         Use jQuery scripts instead of a long set of codes. Not only that it is lightweight but alos cross-browser JavaScript library available under a dual-license – the MIT License as well as GNU General Public License.

PSD to Zen Cart theme/ template conversion is vital in order to build a complete ecommerce based online portal bundled with advanced functionalities and features. If you are afraid of coding and development work, it is always recommended to hire Zen Cart developer having hands on experience in PSD to Zen Cart conversion, HTML to Zen Cart Integration and Zen Cart development.

What All Do I Need To Run A Shopping Cart on My Own

This is one of the first questions that eat your mind when it comes to creating an online shop. Certainly, the growing demands in the emarket have lead to an increasing number of shopping cart solutions. But then, there is something that you should consider in first place. While running the shopping cart from your website, what all will you need to start with? Let’s have a glance.

5 Strategies to Run a Shopping Cart On Your Own Website

Domain name: Well, as anybody would know, this should be an obvious first part of the process.

Hosting account: This allows scripts to get executed and supports one or more databases. To include a few that runs with these basic configurations:

            ·         Linux web server with Apache  ·         Php/Perl script execution  ·         MySQL databases

A shopping cart system: Amidst the many ecommerce solutions, listed below are a few popular open-source shopping cart solutions:

Magento: Magento can run on basically any type of hosting or server as long as you have a minimum memory allotment of 256 MB and meet the requirements.

Zen-Cart:  A free shopping cart system that can be an asset to your company because of its feature rich interface.

OsCommerce: Similar to Zen Cart, Os Commerce is feature-rich open source software with a solid community of supporters that help with the creation of plugins and modules.

Payment processor: If you’re catering to an online audience, you need to have a way to accept digital payments, such as credit cards using payment gateways like PayPal, Charge.com, Authorize.net, and so on.

SSL – Encrypted website pages:  When you accept credit card payments on your website, ethically you are obliged to protect your customers’ financial information. Setting up encrypted pages of your website requires a bit of technical knowhow and hiring an ecommerce website development company requires attention.

As a bottom line, choosing the right setup for your business needs must be based on your technical capabilities. 

Why to Integrate Zen Cart with Content Management Systems

Zen Cart is very good for running an online shop but then when your organization has a website running a CMS- Zen cart has the flexibility to integrate your online shop to any popular content management system.

Reasons for Integrating Zen Cart with Other CMS

·         Benefit of Single Signin: Giving single sign-in, users can use both CMS and Zen Cart after login.

·         Increasing the Scope of Your Store: If you already have Zen cart shop planning to add a blog where users can write & read articles then WordPress will come to your mind. But the major challenge here is to integrate your store with WordPress. In that case, Zen Cart Developers can be the only help.

How to integrate with various CMS?

Integrating with Joomla

If you are using Joomla Website Development you have a number of choices to enable ecommerce functionality. And the best one is using the VirtueMart component. There are two options to have it done: Either use Zen Cart as a wrapper or develop a component based on Zen Cart.

Drupal

With the wide range of modules available for Drupal integrating it with Zen Cart requires a single sign-on facility. Once this module is installed and configured, creating Zen Cart categories and products from Drupal is a breeze.

WordPress

WordPress is an extremely powerful and widely used open-source blogging platform with wide community of developers and users. Although there are some shopping cart plugins for WordPress there are no full-blown features.  But then after downloading the plug-in WordPress on Zen Cart install it on the web server with two options:

1.       in an environment where you have a working WordPress installation and

2.       When you have not installed WordPress.

Following these tactics would help you integrate the both in a manner that users think that the store and shop is the same site. 

Top 4 Features of Wordpress Theme That Claims Responsiveness

Needless to say, Responsive Web design trends has grown these days, and when it comes to selecting a WordPress theme, it is better to lookout for more than just “responsiveness.” Merely being “responsive” isn’t enough.

 With that in mind, here we shall talk about the top 4 features every Custom Ecommerce Design in WordPress theme that claims to be responsive should have.

4 Most Important Features of Responsive WordPress Themes

Easy-to-Access Menu

No matter what the screen size is, an easily accessible menu is a must for good web design and this applies to responsive themes, too. In other words, when the screen size decreases typically menus shrink down from the standard list across the top of the page into a drop down style.

Logical Scaling

There is quite a misconception that responsive themes have their ability to shrink down.  But then the fact is shrinking it does not make it a good theme.  A truly responsive theme will scale down logically with respect to the content, graphics, and menus customized for that specific screen size.

Prominent Social Buttons

This is very obvious that social buttons that remain visible on any screen size improve the chances of your content being shared. Hiring a web design company who support spreading the word might require you to offer your social account info up front so as to accomplish marketing better.

Compatibility Check

Regardless of what operating system or browser they’re accessed on the best responsive WordPress themes look and feel as they should. Nothing should go wrong between Chrome, Firefox or Safari on any platform.  That’s the mark of excellent web design.

Responsive WordPress themes mark an essential trend in ecommerce web design. So next time your web designers talk about themes, make sure to look into its details about installing before doing so.

Significance of Xcart in Today’s Shopping Scenario

While online shopping has become an everyday affair, one of the leading shopping carts, XCart is often considered when you are looking for an open source PHP based platform. Evolved into a robust and full-scale ecommerce solution, it delivers rich shopping features, mobile commerce, useful administrative tools, support and high level security.

Let’s have a glance at its various useful features.

Administration Features

For starters with fewer skills to manage an online shop, here are the main features that will make store administration easier.

·         Lets you track inventory that includes detailed product statistics and catalogue manager.

·         Its elegant shopping cart development allows merchants to track and analyse sales properly.

Shopping Cart and Mobile Compatibility:

With built-in responsiveweb design template screens, there are a wide range of shopping features to satisfy the needs of both merchants and customers. It boasts many advantages like:

·         To sell a wide range of goods, services etc. along with downloads

·         Options to compare and review products before moving to shopping cart

·         Provides integration with all major payment gateways, shipping caries and social media networks.

Friendly Support System and Security:

Coming to security aspects, xcart ecommerce web development provokes

·         To ensure that customers have 24/7 access to support via live chat or phone.

·         large community forums to help both developers and beginners

·         100% PCI-DSS, compliant recognised by all major credit card vendors.

To conclude, X-Cart offers both open and hosted solutions in order to satisfy multiple needs. Even though the above mentioned features aren’t unique, they make the software a worthy competitor among the best shopping cart software.