So You’ve Installed OSCommerce, Now What?
When you decide to go with osCommerce for your e-commerce site, you can simply take their stock standard layout and insert your information along with some products and voila! You now have a completely functional e-commerce site ready for customers and sales. If you’re like most e-commerce sites however, you’ll want to go a step further than that and customize your online storefront to make it better fit your product or line of products. If you are savvy in both the technical and marketing fields, this will probably be a no-brainer. However, if you are an expert in your product, but not necessarily how to sell your product, this article is for you. It’s filled with tips to help you both design your site and well as market your product.
Cutomize Your Site
1. Change your colors
You can go into your stylesheet.css file (in your catalog root folder) and simply change the colors from the stock layout. It’s amazing what a difference something as simple as a custom color layout can do for your website!
2. Choose a template
If you don’t want to start your website design from scratch, you can use a template that will completely transform your online store, find templates at http://www.oscommercetemplates.net.
3. Change your CSS (Style Sheet)
If you don’t want to change the complete template you might decide to change just one thing on the site. This could be the background, buttons or logo. Whichever option you choose, make sure you do something to make the site your own!
4. Improve your images
Spend some time learning some image editing programs so that you can save your pictures in high quality with the smallest file size so that they both look great and load quickly from the website. With the high speed of the Internet, most people don’t have the patience to wait for slow loading pictures and they could even leave your site rather than wait for the images to load properly.
5. Change the page titles
Make sure that you give each page a descriptive title, this will ensure that when search engines spider your store, they will have the appropriate keywords and this will help searchers to want to click on your site.
6. Would YOU shop at your store?
Customers do not like long drawn out checkouts, and will leave if they see any errors as they brows the store. If you can get the information you need as quickly as possible, ie less than two pages including the confirmation of information page, your site will have an advantage over those sites that draw it out. Check every single page to ensure that there are no errors and everything looks good. The osCommerce forum has recommendations on how to achieve this.
Market Your Products
1. Make your site unique
This is a basic marketing technique and is sometimes referred to as creating a Unique Selling Proposition. Basically, this is a simple statement that tells people what makes your store and your business unique from others, especially those in the same niche. Whether you always offer free shipping or guarantee the lowest prices, your unique selling proposition is what sets you apart from the all the other online stores in your market.
2. Don’t forget to sell your product!
Obtaining visitors to your site and getting them to stay on the site are important, but once they are there you need to actually sell the product. You won’t be there to tell them about the items and they aren’t in a traditional store on the high st to examine the product themselves, so your descriptions need to do this for you and the customer. Be detailed, be specific and be honest. Include who would likely enjoy the product and why they would need it. Reviews of the products (link to them from the product page) will also help greatly. Instead of focusing on the details of the product or service, put some emphasis in the benefits. Like they say in sales: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”.
3. Be the owner in front of your store
Remember when you knew your butchers name, and he would remember yours? Customers like to know the person behind the store. Make it easy for them. Give your customers a way to contact you. This includes a name, address, email and phone number. If they have no way to get into contact with you, your credibility with the customer drops.
4. Offer more than just the product or service
Don’t be afraid to add articles, tips and information related to your product for customers coming to your site. It will increase your credibility as well as give them reasons to return to your site even if they need any of your products right away. Also, reviews add credibility and content in the eyes of search engines as well.
Keep in contact by sending out a periodic newsletter that gives useful information, announces specials and sales and highlights specific products. With just a few customizations your osCommerce webstore can be a unique site that fits your philosophy, product, requirements and above all, your personality.