Oscommerce Webmaster's Guide To Selling Online

Increase your sales and profits with expert tips on SEO, Marketing, Design, Selling Strategies, etc.

If you have an osCommerce-based online business, you need this book. Packed with expert guidance on all aspects of building a better online, this book will make your store stand out from the crowd.

All approaches and techniques described here are proven to have worked well for successful osCommerce-based online businesses among the, over 650, all around the globe with which the author has been actively involved as developer, project manager, or online business consultant.

osCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution written in PHP and MySQL that can be set up on various platforms. More than 10,000 businesses and sole traders all around the world benefit from its features and flexibility. The importance of the osCommerce community consisting of over 100,000 can not be stressed enough as this is where both online merchants and web developers can communicate and find solutions. There are many "contributions" — modules for osCommerce that further extend its functionality — making it suitable for almost every business's requirements.

What You Will Learn From This Book:

• Calculate and monitor profits
  
• Monitor and track efficiency of advertising campaigns
  
• Optimize your osCommerce online store for search engines
  
• Internal and External Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
  
• Getting popular on search engines
  
• Web page optimization
  
• Structure and dynamic content
  
• Keyword selection
  
• Back-linking strategies
  
• Make your SEO campaigns pay off
  
• Superb ideas for appealing store design
  
• Reach profitable new markets by fine-tuning your product catalog
  
• Best practices for product listing and product information pages
  
• Build and maintain customer confidence
  
• Run a properly planned promotion campaign
  
• Use and extend the reporting facility of osCommerce
  
• Practical insights on creating custom reports
  
• Improve your process and efficiency while maintaining business profitability
  
• Convert customers into repeat customers

Who This Book is Written For
This book is for anyone administering an osCommerce site, including webmasters, content managers, store owners, and marketing managers, who do not need to understand PHP or MySQL to benefit from this book. The tips and techniques described in this book can be applied to any small, medium sized e-commerce site.

This is not an implementation guide; developers implementing osCommerce-based e-commerce sites would benefit from reading Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook.

About the Author
Vadym Gurevych holds a Masters of Software Development degree from Kharkov National Technical University (Ukraine) and has been creating commercial software products for businesses for 10 years. His interest in learning more about the management and business side of the process led him to join the DataLink UK Ltd. in 2001 as Project Manager. Based in the UK, Datalink (which also trades as Holbi) concentrates on providing a wide range of bespoke e-commerce solutions to its local and international customers. In those days Vadym didn’t imagine managing open-source projects, but since 2002 he has been creating osCommerce-based sites and this has become Datalink’s main source of revenue since 2004. Now Managing Director of DataLink UK Ltd., Vadym is responsible for strategy development and business decisions, and for ensuring that his team of 30 provides customers with the most efficient solutions. Since he finds it exciting and sometimes challenging, he still personally supervises major sales deals and manages major projects. He has been happily married to his wife Elena for almost eight years now, and also finds time to write/maintain a popular blog, osCommerceBlog.com, and contribute to DatalinkUK.com and Holbi.co.uk. Vadym writes: “Talking to a customer, finding out the best solution for the business, making sure that solution is properly implemented, and seeing the business improving – is what brings satisfaction and makes me happy about the way my career has developed to date.”