Quote Originally Posted by stevesh View Post
I guess I'll disagree on a couple of points:

The Numinix Wordpress integration is, in my experience, stable and trouble-free.

In the case of things like Facebook and Twitter links that take your customer to a different (and possibly more interesting) website, I'd agree with schoolboy. I think of a blog integrated into Zencart as being like an extension of EZ pages. The content of both is important and should provide the visitor with information that helps her make a buying decision.
We looked at this in some detail and analysed (using Google Analytics data with funnelling and goals) for a period of 8 months on three of our clients' sites, where the client had insisted on a "close" relationship between their blog and their eComm site.

In two cases, we found that between 17% and 20% of visitors each month who landed on a GOAL page (add to cart), funnelled through a product info page, were then going through to the blog link and abandoning their carts. In the case of site "A" (educational resources) the value of abandoned sales as a consequence of following the blog link after arriving at the goal page amounted to about £53,000 over the 8 month period. In the case of client "B" the lost sales value was about £33,000.

We took off the blog links and then also removed both side-columns at the cart display and checkout pages - so almost NO distractive links were being shown. The key objective at that point is to streamline checkout.

Removing distractive links, and stopping abandonment via the blog has INCREASED checkout_success by nearly 72% on site "A" and just over 50% on site "B".

The third site, sadly stopped operating half-way through the exercise, but was showing the same tendencies.

We now use the principe of "All roads lead to Rome"... where "Rome" is the checkout_success page... How a "blog" can be more important than this puzzles me...