Today, April 1 (this is NOT a joke) we switched to a new online store and shopping cart system based on Zen Cart, a popular open source product. After an exhaustive search we determined that Zen Cart’s flexibility, extensibility, and feature set made it our best choice, even better than some system was evaluated that cost thousands of dollars. One of our main criteria was the ability to support and even expand our drop- ship and download sales capability. We believe Zen Cart fills the bill.
NOTE: the new cart system requires that every shopper create an account. Rather than integrate this cart with our membership management system and create a login for all of our members, we chose to keep them separate. Why? Simple, we have many store customers that never register for our other site features. We felt it was not necessary for them to create a full site membership simply to shop in our store.
However, creating a store account does have some advantages over our old cart system:
- Customers can log into their store account and check that status of any order.
- Customer who purchase download products can login and re-download a product, up to five times or for 14 days, whichever comes first.
- We will offer account holders special discounts and can transfer gift certificate values to their store account.
Some additional Zen Cart benefits.
- Better classification of products. We revamped the store category system to make it easer for shoppers to find what they need. You can find most products using more than one category.
- A list of Artists / Brands allows shoppers easy viewing all of the products that we offer for a particular vendor.
- We display specials and reduced items on the main page, in the side boxes, and with every category page displayed. We are committed to aggressive pricing and this new interface allows shoppers to more easily find our bargains.
- Email lists – we can inform you of specials and discounts based on your purchase history. We promise not to constantly fill your email inbox, and you can always unsubscribe.
- Gift Certificates - we will be offering gift certificates, which we believe will expand our sales opportunities.
- Permanent Cart - Any products added to your online cart remain there until you remove them, or check them out.
- Address Book - We can now deliver your products to another address other than yours! This is perfect to send birthday gifts direct to the birthday-person themselves.
- Order History - View your history of purchases that you have made with us.
- Products Reviews - Share your opinions on products with our other customers.
Finally, we will be expanding our product lines by adding more and more manufacturers. There are also many other Amazon like features (e.g. others bought this and similar items, purchase items together and save) we will be adding as soon as we have the cart tweaked for maximum performance.
I hope you take a look around.
http://latter-dayvillage.com/store/
Warning, this is still a work in progress, so you may see missing images and a few warts/knots here and there. Do not hesitate to write us about your impressions and with any questions you may have.
