For many products and commodities, creating an online store as a means to vendor your products would make a lot more sense than a traditional brick and mortar shop. How and where to begin? Fortunately, the process of obtaining your own piece of internet space can be easy - provided you look in the right places.
To begin, you will need a PCI compliant environment in which you can safely and securely process transactions of credit cards or anything similar. Many e-commerce solutions like the ZenCart shopping cart provide you with a PCI compliant platform, as well as tools to create, design, and many other useful tools that are handy in running an online business.
Zen Cart is an open source online store management system. It contains a dynamic and robust user community that’s supportive and contributive to the advancement of its usability via plugins and addons that’s safe and authorized by the Zen Cart team. For those that want even more useful tools to manage their stores, the Admin Tools plugins are invaluable. For example, you may want to store and archive all your business related emails. This can be done with the Email Archive Manager plugin. When enabled, every email sent through your cart is stored in a database table. The admin utility to look up emails is also in this table. Other useful plugins include the ZC Inventory Report where it allows you to check the stock levels of the products in your Zen Cart store. Reports are displayed with: product ID, quantity in stock, product title, master category, price, and extended retail value of stock on hand.
Zen Cart makes managing an online storefront easy but the first and most important step is to find a business web hosting company that can handle your site. Choosing a quality hosting company is critical because you want them to be able to have your site running at 100% even with high traffic. In addition, having a reliable hosting service means that your site has a better chance at getting better internet search ranks.
