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This is the second blog post in a series designed to increase the sales of your website. In his article “20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment, Part 1” author Bryan Eisenberg explains that no matter the number of steps in your checkout process, your website should clearly let your future customers know where they are in the process. Number the steps, and label the task clearly for each step (We will be talking about properly renaming some of the Zen Cart checkout steps in a future post). Give your shoppers an opportunity to review what they did in previous steps and a way to return to their current step if they go back.

Clyde Jones added a contribution to the Zen Cart website the allows you to number the steps.

Title:  Order Steps – Tableless
Author: Clyde Jones
Version: 2.3.0

This contribution creates a Tableless graphical indicator of where you are in the checkout process. It also takes advantage of per page stylesheet system available in Zen Cart version 1.3.6 and newer Based on Order Steps Edition 2.

Our Ultimate Zen Cart’s High Conversion Packs come pre-installed with these addons along several others geared to the Conversion Rate improvement of your Zen Cart store.

When it comes to improving the conversion rate of your zen cart there are many options and techniques to consider. Search all over the web and you’ll find so many tips and tricks to do so. I’ve seen blog posts with 5-7 tips to some with way over 100.

A particular author, Bryan Eisenberg grabbed my attention several years ago. Bryan wrote a two part article called “20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment” in which he points out some of the best techniques that still apply to today’s online consumer.

In this post (and several others to come) I will talk about his techniques and how to incorporate these into your Zen Cart Online store.

Tip # 1:  How many steps are in your checkout process?

This is usually what most people focus on. Bryan’s clients checkout processes range from one to seven steps. Bryan discovered the number of steps is not all that critical. One of his clients was able to bring the checkout process from six steps down to one; they found no correlation between reduction of steps and reduction in abandonment rate. Once people found what they came for, they found the time to check out no matter how many steps were involved.

Should you change the number of steps? Yes! But if you don’t have an inexpensive and simple way to test, it may not be worth the time, effort, and expense of reducing the number of steps in the checkout process. Click Here for the Full Article

How do we apply these techniques to our Zen Cart stores?

Fortunately for zenners,  there are many addons on the Zen Cart websites that can dramatically improve the performance of your site. To apply the techniques for this particular post you should download and install the following:

Title: Fast and Easy Checkout for Zen Cart
Author: Numinix
Version: 1.62 (at the time of this writing)

Fast and Easy Checkout (FEC) combines the payment and shipping checkout pages into one page for a shortened checkout process. It can also simulate the checkout confirmation page making a seemingly one page checkout.  The importance of this module is that it reduces the steps that can deter customers from completing purchases on your website.  Therefore, it can potentially increase your conversion rates.

Title: Google Analytics by Andrew
Author: Andrew Berezin
Version: 2.2.1

This module allows you to integrate the advanced e-commerce Analysis provided by the Google service named Google Analytics. Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 40% of the 10,000 most popular websites. Click Here to Open your Free Google Analytics Account.

Our Ultimate Zen Cart’s High Conversion Packs come pre-installed with these addons along several others geared to the Conversion Rate improvement of your Zen Cart store.