If you have an osCommerce-based online business, you need this book. Packed with expert guidance on all aspects of building a better online, this book will make your store stand out from the crowd.All approaches and techniques described here are proven to have worked well for successful osCommerce-based online businesses among the, over 650, all around the globe with which the author has been actively involved as developer, project manager, or online business consultant.osCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution written in PHP and MySQL that can be set up on various platforms. More than 10,000 businesses and sole traders all around the world benefit from its features and flexibility. The importance of the osCommerce community consisting of over 100,000 can not be stressed enough as this is where both online merchants and web developers can communicate and find solutions. There are many "contributions" ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù modules for osCommerce that further extend its functionality ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù making it suitable for almost every business's requirements.
Calculate and monitor profits
Monitor and track efficiency of advertising campaigns
Optimize your osCommerce online store for search engines
Internal and External Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Getting popular on search engines
Web page optimization
Structure and dynamic content
Keyword selection
Back-linking strategies
Make your SEO campaigns pay off
Superb ideas for appealing store design
Reach profitable new markets by fine-tuning your product catalog
Best practices for product listing and product information pages
Build and maintain customer confidence
Run a properly planned promotion campaign
Use and extend the reporting facility of osCommerce
Practical insights on creating custom reports
Improve your process and efficiency while maintaining business profitability
Convert customers into repeat customers
Detailed Table of Contents:In Chapter 1 you will see a brief introduction to osCommerce, and learn how to calculate and monitor profits. Attracting visitors to your website is an essential task to gear the business up. In Chapter 2 we review several ways to advertise and get visitors to your site, including: organic search, banners, pop-ups, link exchange, affiliate programs, newsletters, forums and blogs, and online directories. This chapter has extensive insights on how to track the efficiency (and other variables) of an advertisement campaign.Chapter 3 shows you how to race to the top of search engine result pages. You will learn methods, techniques, and actions to make your store easily accessible to and indexed by search engines. If you decide to keep ahead of the game and hire a professional SEO consultant, you will want to dig deeper into this chapter where we review aspects of hiring professional SEO consultants and show how to track SEO campaign results. This chapter familiarizes you with the good and bad search engines practices and helps you find which keywords work bestChapter 4 concentrates on solutions and practices that help authoring original dynamic content, for your users and customers to post content online. We review the benefits of using dynamic content solutions like CMS, forums, blogs, and feeds, and their integration with osCommerce. Chapter 5 gives you insight on why it is important to build customer confidence and how to do it. We review ways to improve your online store and business model to make customers more confident about placing orders online with your online store. A good design often spells the difference between failure and success. Chapter 6 covers effective design of an online store; here you will learn to optimize design for different types of customers and customize it to match your corporate identity. We discuss common-sense approaches to developing design templates and also tackle practical issues like caching and improving page loading speed using database and PHP script optimization to ensure a smoother customer experience. In Chapter 7, you will learn how sales can be improved in osCommerce by improving your product catalog. It concentrates on improving navigation and making customer interaction intuitive and friendly. In Chapter 8 we discuss how and why order values can be increased, and what effect this has on the turnover and profit figures. It shows how to increase order values by putting both the customer and the online merchant in a win-win situation. Understand the dynamics of cross-linking products, creating product bundles, configurable products, and employing the minimum order amount strategy. Chapter 9 covers how to run a properly planned promotion campaign, while keeping an eye on operational costs. The turnover of an online store can be increased by increasing its market share?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthis chapter shows your how. From grabbing customers to maximizing what you get from your suppliers, running affiliate programs, and B2B programs for trade customers.Chapter 10 shows you how important it is to monitor and constantly improve the conversion rates of online business, and analyzes how conversion rates affect profitability of the business. It shows how to improve the checkout process in osCommerce, and how to utilize individual customer accounts to increase sales. In Chapter 11 we further explorer monitoring of the performance of the website by creating and of course understanding various reports, and using statistical information to improve the efficiency of an osCommerce-based online business. In this chapter you will get an insider?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s understanding of using and extending the reporting facility of osCommerce, including: reports to plan your advertisement budget, re-arrange advertisement campaigns, track and forecast sale figures, find bestselling and most profitable products, manufacturers, and categories and highlight certain products by marking them as featured, locate best-buying customers and reward them, track stock and ease re-ordering of the most popular products from suppliers, track customers and use previous order history for marketing purposes, send targeted newsletters to customers, and even plan your online store s net profit figures and its profitability. In Chapter 12 you will learn how the online store can benefit from having repeat customers, and how to convert customers into repeat customers. This chapter shows how to increase this conversion rate by providing loyal customers additional benefits, like a loyalty points, referral bonuses, etc.