Zen and the Art of Shopping Carts

A couple months ago I was given the task of setting up a new website for my company, specifically to sell off excess inventory. We produce safety signs, placards, decals and the like, which we normally sell through industrial supply companies that you may have heard of. We have a lot of stuff in stock that we aren’t able to move through our normal channels.

Ok, I thought, this could be interesting. I’ve never done a shopping cart type of website before, so this should be a fun learning exercise. I knew that I would have to learn about credit card processing, shipping rates and things. I knew that there were a large number of open-source shopping carts available, so the bulk of the hard stuff would already be written.

I obtained a good domain name, and an account on a reasonably priced hosting service. I started looking at various packages, and I found that, on the surface, Zen-Cart seemed to be the right choice. It’s been around a long time, it’s very widely used, and it has an active user and add-on community. It has modules builtin to work with a lot of shippers and credit processing gateways, and seemed to be just the ticket.

Well, the site is live now, at Overstock Safety Signs. I’m slowly getting image files from our art department to fill out the product listings. After a very great struggle I figured out which of the 15 different addons would do the easiest job of semi-automating the task of populating the product database with descriptions, prices, etc. It’s still a mess, with a lot of tedious editting of Excel spreadsheets, and some clever SQL to patch things together.

I will be posting some more details of my journey, but for now, the site is up, and I’m now embarking on the next, and probably harder part: getting it to show up on Google and Bing, and attracting customers.

If you need, or know someone who needs “Hard Hat Required” signs, or SODIUM SILVER CYANIDE decals, please come on over and see if we don’t have the best prices.

Thanks.