A few tips for those starting out!!!

There are a few things you should change to get more conversions....

Get rid of the text that says "Your visitors cart will be merged with your members cart..." - that throws people off, it doesnt mean anything to anyone

Get rid of anything mentioning "An Account" customers usually dont want an account, they just want to buy something.

Better say something like "If you havent shopped here before we just need to collect your information so you can track your order"

On the checkout page, where it is asking for a discount coupon.. change the text to say "If you have been given a discount coupon, you can enter it here". Otherwise people might think they cant shop wihtout a coupon. People dont know what a Redemption code is

Another, really important... DONT ask the customer for their date of birth. Americans dont like giving their date of birth, because using their date of birth and name you can figure out their social security number... and they are scared of identity theft

If you are using paypal you can change the Pay Using Debid Credit card via paypal... to also mention that they dont NEED a paypal account to pay, they can just enter their billing information into the PayPal screen.

Cheers

It might be a good idea to give a path to each of the atlerations you are suggesting so we will know exactly where to alter the files you mentioned. Your tips are great! Just need paths to alter the files.

Thanks!

perkiekat:

It might be a good idea to give a path to each of the atlerations you are suggesting so we will know exactly where to alter the files you mentioned. Your tips are great! Just need paths to alter the files.

Thanks!
MUCH better than giving actual paths (which may be relevant only to 1 person's site), it's advisable to give the how-to-find instructions instead:
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=38
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=39

You might want to check out a mod called FEC. It includes option to get rid of necessity to create account all together. I already make similar changes like you point out and try many SEO things, but by far, the one thing that made a HUGE improvement in conversions was to get rid of the whole create account thing. It doesn't shorten the checkout process much, but having to come up with a password really puts lots of people off. In some case, this made almost 45% improvement in sales.

If your products are suitable to it, I found that adding a "make an offer" option also helped tremendously. Even if you don't accept the offer, it gets you in communication with a potential customer and you can often close a deal that else wise is lost.

Example of simple make-offer is here:
http://www.laserdiscvault.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=643

the developers tool kit is a cracking way to find text to change... using it also helped me learn the ZC file structure...
my first site took 3 months, after discovering the dev tool kit... i can be up and running in a few days

excellent idea, which ever one of you thought of it!