Deliver-Ability

Scary or not, it is very true and many of you are affected already and don't even realize it. You see, your Zen Cart sends mail from the software. In many cases software generated email is less deliverable to begin with... add some bad hosting and Zen Cart configurations... and boom, very low deliver-ability.

There are several tools to check your email protocol and server/DNS setup, and we will get to those in a minute. But, for now, lets run a simple test that will identify one of the hardest mail networks to deliver software generated email to...

Go to Yahoo and create a brand new email account using a non-domain based email as the backup email address. Next go to your Zen Cart and create and account and order something using the new Yahoo email address. Now check your new mailbox to see if the account creation and confirmation emails were delivered. Most of you will find Yahoo sent these directly to spam.

Why would they do that?

Some time ago, Yahoo, who is owned my SBC (ATT) decided that they would do a "better job" of filtering email spam. In doing so they went over the edge and in a few days time blocked about have of the email addresses on the planet. In order to be unblocked from Yahoo, SBC, ATT and a few other small ones, you have to provide answers and requests on a laborious form. The level of questions on this form made it so hosting company would likely have to complete it for you.

Having screwed up so severely, they were then unable to keep up with the "unblocking" requests and mandated that every IP could only submit so many requests in a certain time frame. Crazy huh?

Our hosting company did an awesome job of creating proxy IPs to get the submissions done for ourselves and hundreds of hosted clients.... But did you get unblocked and un-spammed?

Email tools provide some insight as to the DNS and server configuration for your domain based email accounts. These tools provide information regarding blocked/banned/blacklisted hosts and IP addresses.... as well as some metrics necessary in this day and age to ensure your emails are delivered.

Reverse DNS lookup

This method of blocking spam is very server intensive. The receiving email server performs a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address of the incoming mail connection and checks if there is a valid domain name associated to it. While this is not used for most ISPs as a wholly determining factor, AOL and their subsidiaries will refuse your emails without it. Check your rDNS here.

SPF Record

SPF Record or Sender Policy Framework is a method for preventing sender address forgery. Have you gotten those emails appearing to be from someone else, besides who they are really from? Spoofed. Your server's SPF record can help to prevent this...

An example...

1. Suppose a spammer forges domain.com and tries to email spam you, the sender connects from somewhere other than domain.com.
2. When the email is sent, you see MAIL FROM: <user_address@domain.com>, but you do not have to take his word for it. You can ask domain.com if the IP address is really from their network.
3. In this example, domain.com publishes a valid SPF record. That DNS record tells the mail receiving server how to find out if the sending machine/IP is allowed to send email from domain.com.
4. If domain.com responds that they recognize the sending machine/IP, it passes, and you can assume the email sender is who they say they are. If the email message fails the SPF tests, it is a forgery, and likely a spammer.

More information on SPF, and how it works, visit the Sender Policy Framework site.

To check and see if your domain has a proper SPF record, use this SPF record tool. If your domain based email addresses do not, contact your hosting company and ask them to set it up. More and more email receiving servers are checking for a valid SPF response, this is crucial to your email deliver-ability.

Interestingly enough, some web hosts claim they do not have this ability, which is likely BS... But face it this is your business and if you web host cannot or will not set up a proper SPF record for their servers... then you are likely hosted with a bunch of spammers who can hurt your site's ability to rank and set off trust issues with McAfee and Norton in search results!. Time to move to a proper web host.

DomainKeys, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

These are also used to fight against forged emails. The protocol uses encryption technology to verify that an email is really from the domain from which it appears to be. If a message has been verified through DomainKeys/DKIM (developed by Yahoo), many email programs and web mail will display an icon or message verifying the sender for your email recipients. DomainKey will likely need to be set up by your web host, but many hosting control panels, including cPanel have this ability at your fingertips... Click, click done. Then check it (be sure to follow the instructions).

Sometimes, you can be blacklisted (labeled as a spammer), when you did nothing wrong! What if for example your web host re-uses an IP that was previously blocked for spam and never resolved.... Well, now you are blacklisted too! Use this tool to check your MX record and blacklist status. If you find you are blocked on any, your hosting company ***should handle this for you, but if they won't you can try to contact the resource directly.

There are some things you can easily do to help ensure the deliver-ability of your Zen Cart's emails.

• Check and ensure a proper SPF record, DomainKeys and rDNS are setup on your server
• In your Zen Cart admin under Configuration >> Email options check and set the following
  1. Email Address (sent FROM) is set to a valid email address, preferably @yourdomain.com
  2. Emails must send from known domain? is set to "Yes"
  3. Email Admin Format? Set to TEXT, as it has the highest deliver-ability rate
  4. Allow Guest To Tell A Friend set to false, so that spammers cannot route email through your website
  5. Display "Newsletter Unsubscribe" Link? Set to True
• Use a proper service to send email marketing and newsletters
• Leave your CAN Spam policy and remove/unsubscribe instructions in your cart's emails
• Handle remove or unsubscribe requests immediately
• DO NOT check the newsletter to true on your create account form. Many will not notice and then later spam or report your emails. (Configuration >> Customer Details >> Show Newsletter Checkbox) set to zero or 1
• Set default email format to text (Configuration >> Customer Details >> Customer Default Email Preference) set to zero, text

Face it, the deliver-ability of your Zen Cart's emails is crucial to your business and is not something to be taken lightly.

What's the difference?

Upgrade, Redesign or Both?

Well, likely most many of the bugs are out of the way for the new release, but some very serious module and customization issues exist for upgrades. While, these modules and customizations are in no way the responsibility of the Zen Cart development team, they are something we all have in our stores.

So, while we look forward to having a development package for new stores in 1.3.9b in the next few days, we are still cautioning against upgrades.

If you really think you need to upgrade, you might consider a "Rip n' Rebuild" situation instead. In this type of scenario, unused and non-compliant modules are removed, broken functions are eliminated and you get a brand new store with all of your products, customers, coupons, orders etc... But no upgrade exceptions and incompatibility issues.

A "Rip n' Rebuild" also gives you the opportunity to look at a new design and layout. Change the things which have been bugging you and optimize your site properly from the start.

The basic idea of rebuilding as opposed to upgrading is to forgive our previous mistakes and have a fresh, clean shopping cart. When deciding to do a rebuild, you will want to consider many things... Including all those modules installed in your current cart, which "you had to have", but never use. Having unnecessary modules only adds load, future upgrade issues and generally headaches.

You might even consider dumping those SEO URL rewrites (we did!) that cause your cart's performance and load to be less than optimum. We will even redirect these pages for you, so that they will re-index and you can recover with a fresh start and a fast cart!

All in all, make no mistake, this is still no inexpensive project, but if you are ready to upgrade it is a genuine consideration for your business. No one likes errors, slow pages and limited ability... You might just have a better idea of your business' needs and cart's operations than when you built your current cart =-)

Check out our own rebuilt store in 1.3.9

Expectations for Zen Cart 2.0 are quite high and impatient. Originally, and still in documentation, 1.3.9 is a security or rollup release. While this is true, it's not the whole story....

As we sift through the changes and play around with the new software, security is definitely a high priority. Some added features include htaccess files to limit access, filetype and other previous vulnerabilities we have been fixing by hand. Some things remain the same, you must still rename your admin folder by hand. This is a very frustrating process for less experienced shop owners, and I hope that 2.0 will allow this function to be accomplished in setup.

The offline credit card processing module has been removed for PCI/DSS compliance standards. You can steal code from 1.3.8 to reinstall this, but consider the risk and look at a proper gateway for processing. The cost of a breech can be in the thousands of dollars, vs a few bucks a month for a proper gateway account such as Authorize.net.

Quite a few changes in payment modules, as they were upgraded for new security protocols, API and integration changes and overall updates that have been previously gimping along or required manual updating. The only downside here is when you upgrade you will need to uninstall these modules in your Zen Cart admin and then reinstall once the upgrade is complete.

All order total and shipping modules were updated with bug fixes and such from 1.3.8.  Nothing new here, just added the bug fixes we have been completing by hand. Again, when upgrading, uninstall these modules and then reinstall them after the upgrade.

Templating is not a big upgrade issue, as the only file touched is tpl_reviews_random.php, which is a bug fix. So your templates for the most part will upgrade without issue.

Modules are a huge issue. Many Most are untested and not compatible with Zen Cart 1.3.9. Forum users have been maintaining a makeshift list of working modules here, but your own testing is an absolute necessity. The truth of the matter is that you will likely want to wait a few months to upgrade if you have customized and modded your cart.

There has already been a patched release of 1.3.9 which is only less than a month old. While this was only a file update, there is no guarantee that other updates will not occur and be more complicated. This small file update took me 45 minutes to accomplish with only one module to re-merge files for.... I also had issues with the new .htaccess files in the admin section and replaced them with the working ones from 1.3.9a. About 18 new bugs were fixed in the 1.3.9 second release (B).

Zen Cart 1.3.9

So what's new?

Actually quite a bit is new, and that is why the release is not really just a security update. Some additional functionality and compatibility was added....

• Zen Cart 1.3.9 is PHP 5.3 ready, without patching
• PCI issues have been dramatically reduced
• SSL handling and renegotiation, session handling and detection are fixed for most server configurations
• Canonical url tags were added
• Developers toolkit has most robust filtering and search ability
• New PayPal support added for UK - 3D-Secure and micropayments
• Fixes for the handling of failed PayPal IPNs to be processed with cURL
• Integrated split tax lines without previous customization needed
• Easy Pages can now have their own individual stylesheets
• ISO countries update
• Updated spiders.txt including Yandex
• configure files now attempt to automatically set their own permissions to 444
• Normal operations are significantly less query intensive and run faster
• On page PHP errors removed for PCI and logging enabled automatically
• PCI compliance for auto complete on credit card forms is resolved
• The "Tell a Friend" feature, which should still be set to require a login, now throttles the spam that can be sent through the form
• Brute force protection added to the admin login
• Improved attribute selector
• Audience selector crashes have been fixed
• Who's online is updated and works significantly smoother and lighter
• Example robots.txt was added
• Customer and product search was improved in your admin
• Catalog search is significantly better
• Downloadable product bugs are fixed for "most" server configurations

So I still suggest that if your Zen Cart is very customized or heavily modded that you wait a bit to upgrade... Fact is you might just consider a rebuild to get a clean start with the new software.

Purely Poultry presents quite a unique online product, as a matter of fact this is one product line we have never worked with before. This fairly unique product line affords them an edge for rank, as the pool of fishes are few to compete with. Fixing some of the issues we found with the cart could clearly have very positive and fast results.

Below is a mildly edited copy of the Zen Cart site report we already provided to Purely Poultry. They have graciously agreed to allow us to publish this and share their issues. We thanks them for providing this medium to help other shop owners who may have similar issues and problems.

Load Speed Main Page: 237.53 seconds at 28.8kbs. We would like to see this well under 50, but the ideal standard is 30 seconds @ 28.8kbs.

On the main page only 5 HTML errors were noted, this is not bad at all... But repairing these will increase the ability for their site to be effectively crawled by the search engines and additionally increase the usability of the website.

Title: Main page title is 14 characters long and the suggested search engine friendly limit is 65. Your title is 100% relevant to your main page content, but lacks good information relevant to the page. This tag should contain a short (65 characters or less including spaces) description of what this site is about.

Current Title: Purely Poultry

Description: Main page description contains 113 characters and is 100% relevant to the main page content.

This description should contain text under 250 characters in natural language to prompt searchers to click through to your website. The Meta description is NOT used for the purpose of ranking your site's pages, but rather as a means to elicit a click through from searchers. Note that your description is somewhat spammy as it is essentially a keyword list. Additionally, this tag should be a minimum of 100 characters for Google not to give a short description error in webmasters tools.

Current Description: Purely Poultry : - Pheasants Chickens Bantams Guinea Keets Books Turkey Poults Ducklings Goslings Quail Peafowl

Canonical Domain url Check:
Your site is returning a proper canonical 301 redirect from www to non-www or vice verse. Google currently has cached versions of both.

This means that sitewide canonical duplication exists as both the non-www and the www versions of the urls work. Duplication of this nature can cause many rank issues and even split PageRank between the 2 different canonical versions.

Google indicates that pages have been omitted from regular search results for being to similar or duplicate in nature.

Total indexed in Google.com: 624

Pages omitted from Google's Main Index: 129

Pages within the Google's regular search index: 495

*Your site has 718 pages indexed in Yahoo search.

*Your site has 15 indexed pages in MSN/Bing.

*You have 1 page indexed in Ask.com's search index

Sitemap and Robots.txt:

A valid search engine sitemap.xml for your site was not found. This document, which is a specific sitemap for search engines, is designed to help search engine spiders locate and crawl your content better and therefore should NOT be styled for human visitors.

A valid, but miss-configured robots.txt for your site was found. A robots.txt is a search engine universal markup to prevent well behaved bots from crawling pages which have content of no value to the searchable index, are duplicate or blocked from indexing.

This has been partially corrected.

Backlinks: Your entire domain currently has 647 total back link(s) from domains other than your own.

This isn't bad at all, keep up the good work!

PageRank: Your main page has a toolbar Page Rank 4 and there is no issue with your PageRank dispersion with regard to canonical duplication.

Sites on IP: Your site's IP is 000.000.000 and there are a total of 8 domains hosted on that IP, none of which appear to be flagged as "bad neighbors" or hosting questionable content.

Spam and Hidden Text: Upon scanning your site hidden text was found, that appears to be related to your CSS menu across the top of your page.

Invisible text found. Method(s): CSS 'display' property set to 'none'.
Invisibility purpose: Impossible to say.
Text: New Products

Miscellaneous:

• Your site appears to have what we call the "nofollow bug". While this is a Zen Cart
  bug, a fix has been available for quite some time. Essentially every page on your
  site currently has a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> tag
  with in the head element that tells the search engines not to follow or index links
  found within that page.
• You should nofollow ancillary page links, or advertising links within your site
  (once the bug fix has been applied) to stop the flow of PageRank and prevent the
  crawlers from crawling these pages unnecessarily wasting precious crawl time.
• We would advise you to place a phone number in a prominent location through out
  your site. eg: in the header. To give troubled customers a sense of security, and a
  means of contacting some one should an issue arise. Without it shoppers tend to
  abandon the cart sales when they encounter any issues what so ever. They will not
  go looking for a contact number! Remember, not every search visitors lands on your
  main page, most land on interior pages.
• The use of mailto links or valid email addresses even in a textual format, like on
  your "Privacy Notice" page will promote spam, as these are crawled and read by
  spiders for the purpose of creating email list for sale to spammers.
• Your "Conditions of Use" is completely blank.
• On your privacy page under "How do we protect your information?" the last line
  of the second paragraph reads "and are required to�keep the information
  confidential."
• You have unsecured elements on your secured SSL pages causing a broken lock.
  This is the number 1 cause of checkout abandonment.
• Your main page and category pages have very little textual content in order to rank
  with. You will find it very difficult to rank well in the major search engines with out
  it. Additionally pages like http://www.purelypoultry.com/bantams-c-155.html with
  very little text and an overwhelming amount of links lacking textual support may be
  viewed negatively by Google.
• It is a very large liability to have "Subscribe to Our Newsletter" checked by default
  on account creation, as shoppers will inadvertently get your newsletter and report
  you as spam. This is a FTC spam violation and has financial and business related
  liability in the US and many other countries.
• Your shopping cart pages still shows part of the default Zen Cart default text
  (defined in includes/languages/english/shopping_cart.php).
• Your "Checkout Success" page contains the following text "This file is located in
  /languages/english/html_includes/classic/
  NOTE: Always backup the files in /languages/english/html_includes/
  your_template"
• You would greatly benefit by reducing the steps involved in the checkout process.
• Removal of the side bars during the checkout process will reduce customer
  distraction as well as checkout abandonment. Once the customer has committed to
  the checkout process you should avoid giving them opportunities to click away.
• Your checkout pages are no secured. This is a PCI compliance violation and your
  company can be fined by the credit card companies.

I want to personally thank Purely Poultry for allowing us to audit and blog their site report results. I invite you all to comment any additional factors and suggestions to help them improve their Zen cart and business.

Google Patent

Google has been applied for and been awarded United States Patent #7624101 called Enhanced Search Results. This new patent award will enhance Google's local search capabilities, including the ability to return a result for a business that includes a phone number, address and often a map at the top of the search results for locally targeted search queries. The means for which this Google local search process will be improved are centered around Google's ability to identify and verify addresses and phone numbers associated with the first natural search result.

Previously, you basically had to submit your local business information to Google Local. However, now Google will be better able to query the WhoIs information for your domain in order to *match or validate locally targeted information within your website. Still suggest you submit and verify your business with Google Local, as there are many other tools available in this application to benefit you business... But now searchers will get better local results regardless.

Google United States Patent 7624101

A method includes receiving a search query from a user and generating search results based on the search query. The method may also include providing the search results and information identifying at least one of a telephone number or an address associated with a first one of the search results to the user. The method may further include providing a link to a map associated with at least the first search result to the user.

Palmetto Engraving

We have our very first brave shop owner's report! Nancy from Palmetto Engraving took the plunge and sent us her site to audit. Before we get started, I must ask you NOT to create a bunch of test accounts on Nancy's site as you look around. I would also suggest that poorly written suggestions and nonconstructive comments are not only counterproductive, but I will not publish anything but constructive suggestions, questions and criticism.

First, kudos to Nancy and her team as the site has completely valid code and is error free.  As with any php driven website software, this is a challenging task at times.

Next we looked at the load speed of her main page. The speed was 37.5 seconds at 28.8kbs. The standard is 30 seconds, but current advances in Internet speed and browser ability really make this speed acceptable. Not to say it couldn't be or shouldn't be improved on, but it's fine in the overall scope of things.

Next we move in the the <head> elements:

The page title is the most important element in this data. We know this is huge on page ranking factor. In order to help you, this element should be short, 60 characters or so and 100% relevant. The title for Palmetto is 57 characters long and 100% relevant. The biggest issue here, is that the title is missing the mark.

Palmetto Engraving, Where Your Thoughts Become Treasures!

While we have no desire to see some of the spammy tactics out there used in any title, we would like to see some better use of keywords here. Something like below is probably more effective.

Personalized Gifts - Palmetto Engraving

We will not be discussing the Meta keyword tag as it's no longer used and completely irrelevant to report on.

The Meta description on the other hand, is not used for rank, but has the very important job of selling searchers on your page --- eliciting a click through.

The current description is just the generated Zen Cart description and should be changed to use the custom tag features. Keyword lists such as this will likely be completely ignored by Google in search results anyhow, but providing a relevant and helpful description can greatly increase Google's use of it and thus your click through.

Palmetto Engraving - Jewelry Clocks Gift Certificates Pet Markers Door Knockers Military Plaques Bookmarks Ornaments Ceramic Tile Murals Entertaining Achievement/Awards Wall Art Car Accessories Gift Ideas Identity Kids Gifts Office Misc. Home Office Signs Photo Panels/ Frames Memory Boxes Custom Mugs Name Tags/Badges custom gifts, custom gift, awards, promotional items

While Palmetto Engraving hasn't any issues with their canonical urls in Google's cache, we can clearly see that the proper canonical www url and the non both work on the main page. You see, Zen Cart properly directs canonical urls for other pages... Just not the main page.

Normally, we would expect to see Google have one non-canonical url (IE, the main page), but in this case, Palmetto's main page is not indexed. This is because the necessary bug fix to repair this is lacking on this Zen Cart, so hiding in the <head> of the main page is a nasty noindex, nofollow tag.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

On a canonical note we also noticed that the default indexes are not setup and redirected properly as the index.php is allowed to load, undirected.

The cart's 404 pages are working properly and the domain url has a (toolbar) PageRank 2, which doesn't have any issue with canonical PR splitting.

Palmetto is well indexed in Google, aside from the domain url and we see that Bing and Yahoo appear to be coming along as well.

We were not able to locate a search engine sitemap, nor robots.txt for Palmetto. While the sitemap is really unnecessary and just a helpful thing to do, the robots.txt is really another matter all together. There are pages in your Zen Cart that just should not be crawled, pages like contact and shopping cart have no value to a search engine's index.

We would like to see shop owners using the built in robots skip function to properly add a noindex, nofollow tag to these types of pages... But they at least should be blocked from crawl with robots.txt. Additionally, if you are using a sitemap.xml... This is where it should be referenced for the autodiscovery.

Palmettos's robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This essentially allows search crawler access to everything.... even /cgi_bin/. The robots.txt is also a great spot to stop search engines from crawling pages that have sort and action parameters for example. While Bing, does not support the use of wildcards, Yahoo and Google do. So adding something like below to specific user agents for Yahoo and Google will keep them from crawling your sorted pages.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*&sort=*

We counted 23 backlinks to Palmetto, from domains other than their own. This is pretty low and link building needs to become a higher priority for their optimization efforts.

Palmetto is hosted on a dedicated IP and is the only domain on the IP. We like this, as the chance of getting a bad rap from poor neighbors on the same server is greatly reduced.

The largest part of our site report is a hand audit of the pages and usability. Jack and I both audited the site independently and then discussed and compiled our results. Below is the list of some of issues we found on Palmetto.

• We found your site to be nicely laid out and and easy to navigate. Very nice job on the template and over all navigational design.
• Your Zen Cart appears to be lacking at least some bug fixes and or security patches, as you currently have your main page blocked from indexing by the search engines. This has been a known bug for a very long time, and there has been a published patch to correct this for almost as long. We recommend you fully patch your cart as soon as possible.
• We would advise you to place a phone number in a prominent location throughout your site. eg: in the header, to give troubled customers a sense of security, and a means of contacting someone should an issue arise. Without it shoppers tend to abandon the cart sales when they encounter any issues what so ever. They will not go looking for a contact number!
• We where not able to locate an FAQ page. This coupled with the lack of an easy to find phone number will leave a troubled customer feeling they have no other choice but to abandon the cart should issues arise.
• Your main page is lacking textual content. This will make it very challenging for you to rank well in the search engines.
• While some of your category and product pages do have adequate text in order to rank, others have little to no textual content. We would advise you to add at least one paragraph of well formatted and descriptive text to each of these pages in order to help you rank better within the search results.
• We would advise you to improve on your Privacy Notice.
• You have not nofollowed ancillary page links within your site to stop the flow of PageRank and prevent the crawlers from crawling these pages unnecessarily wasting precious crawl time.
• Note that your login/registration page contains quite a few elements which notably result in checkout abandonment. The referral section is just an unnecessary step slowing checkout down. Your button are red (a stop color) and decidedly difficult to read and realize. Customer service links here are simply an opportunity for a shopper to click away.
• On your shopping cart page we recommend that you remove the check boxes and instead use just the inline delete button for each line item and keep your "update" button under the whole cart. This is a very common area for shopper confusion. Same button issue here.
• Removal of the side bars during the checkout process will reduce customer distraction as well as checkout abandonment. Once the customer has committed to the checkout process you should avoid giving them opportunities to click away and rather funnel then through checkout without distraction.
• It is poor usability to open your own pages (IE footer links) in a new window, the should open in the same window.
• While we generally, for most stores recommend sending the shopper directly to the shopping cart upon adding a product, not sending them can work as well. However, your system generates this message "Successfully added Product to the cart ..." which is not very notable and does not contain a link to the shopping cart page.
• The RSS feed link in your footer (http://www.palmettoengraving.net/index.php?main_page=rss_feed&feed=new_products) has no products, this should likely be changed to categories, featured or all products so it always contains information.
• Product index pages like this (http://www.palmettoengraving.net/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=56) would greatly benefit from displaying the product description snippets.

I want to thank Nancy for allowing us to audit and blog their results. I invite you all to comment any additional factors you see that can help Palmetto improve thier Zen Cart.

Zen Cart Report

We commonly do Zen Cart site reports for shop owners to get a feel for what needs to be done and can be improved in their websites. These reports are not generated, but rather a hand audit of foundation SEO metrics and on site usability and optimization issues.

We would like to offer up a free Zen Cart report to a brave shop owner willing to share his/her site's issues, url, images and other non-personal data with our readers. This means that your report findings, suggestions and related materials will be posted here for others to read, learn and even contribute to your audit.

Please note that although a winner will be chosen at random from all current month's submissions and that I will have the final approval. This means simply that given our broad readership, shops containing for example, hate material, adult content, illegal or otherwise non PG 13 cannot be accepted.

You must OWN the Zen cart website you submit, and this will be verified... Be prepared to do so. Your site must be in English, this offer has no cash value and no additional services of any kind are implied, nor provided. Existing clients are not eligible.

You will receive our standard Zen Cart report at no charge and results will additionally, as outlined above,  be posted here for community review and participation. We will continue to offer this monthly for all to benefit, so send your Zen Cart in and let's get started. Please use the form below to submit your Zen Cart website 1 time per month only. Shop owners submitting duplicate urls will be disqualified.

Google Anchor Links

If you have doubted the need for fresh, related content on your store pages.... You better rethink your position! Google has improved the search results snippets to include "jump to" links to the page's specific area containing the related content.

We have seen Google recently making huge and innovative changes in sitelinks and snippets, but in fact this most recent innovation may be the most valuable yet. We have discussed here many times, Google's "full text" indexing and ranking ability... Now Google has sought to put that very ability to work for searchers.

Imagine that a shopper is searching for the specs on a gadget they wish to buy, with this type of anchor linking you have a unique opportunity to grab and better convert these topical and information seeking searches. Let's face it, even if you rank for these type of searches, your product pages are designed to sell... Thus very likely the information for this type of search is buried. So much so, that even if they land on the page, they leave never finding the information they are seeking. While this is for good reason, and I do not suggest clouding the ability to shop with this type of information... Now you can include it in a less obtrusive manner, link to it with anchors and discover a entirely fresh conversion opportunity in information gathering searches.

Let's say for example you search Google for "good cholesterol level". You are met with a very unique opportunity in the search results.....

Google Jump to Sitelink

This content or sitelink as we say, not only takes you to the most relevant page... But the most relevant location on that page too!

I know, how can I do that? Well, Google has posted the means to get your site coded and correct anchors set in place for these type of results in a recent post on Webmaster Central Blog. Essentially you will need to relearn a bit of html in order to help Google index you in this manner. Creating page anchors for static pages is really not difficult, but including them in your dynamic pages can be a far greater challenge. Here is a really easy tutorial from W3Schools to get you started.

Zen Cart SEO

Although we answer individual questions in the Zen Cart forum and we talk to Zen Cart shop owners everyday... We have never really put pen to pad for the proper steps to organically optimize your Zen Cart. I will make this list as detailed as possible without losing the attention of the average store owner...

Consider this a 12 Step Program to build your business.

Step 1

Keep your Zen Cart software patched and up to date. This is not only a requirement for PCI compliance, but getting hacked is not good for any business. Let's face it, you change the oil in your car and lock the doors right?

Step 2

Design and usability are huge factors. Even if you have tons of traffic, it matters none if shoppers cannot quickly and easily find your products and checkout. Use SALES, NOT traffic as your measurement. When working on your design, development or existing, search for bottlenecks in your navigation. Remove EVERYTHING that is not helpful or necessary for shoppers. Hire a group of friends to shop and checkout on your site for a particular item each... Then, NO MATTER what you think, fix the issues they find. You see, your average shopper has never built, owned or even knows what a Zen Cart is.

Optimize your checkout. There are free modules to reduce the number of checkout steps available from the Zen Cart Module Repository. Use your common sense... Remove the sidebars from checkout, remove every account creating bit of text that exists and let shoppers checkout without an account (even if they are really creating one), language is everything for the shopper's perception. Remove every single unnecessary thing from your customer information form. Do you really need: Salutation, Fax, Company, Date of Birth, Referral, and yes... even remove your newsletter check. Change the language for the newsletter option to say "Email preference" only. If you have need for newsletters (you should) then use a separate Zen Cart newsletter module. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, use IE and checkout on your site to check for Secure/Non-Secure warnings... as this will stop a shopper dead in their tracks!

Turn off everything you don't need on your product pages off.... Date added? Do shoppers really need this? Move your attributes & add to cart area to the topside of the page... above the description so I can purchase quickly if I already know about the product. IF you intend to use social media buttons, your product page is the spot.... Why on earth would you want people to bookmark your login page for example?

Step 3

No matter what misconceptions you may have... Your site's visitors read text first. Your shoppers need to be able to effectively scan the text on a page to determine if this is the page they need. TEXT, not images! While images obviously have their place in your store, people need text. You also need text to better rank your pages and create relevance for your topical content. So yes, use great demonstrative and high quality product images... But do not forsake the text.  Your shoppers need high quality, natural and descriptive text to buy products from you. Do not duplicate manufacturers descriptions or anyone else's for that matter. If you haven't the time to create your own content in order to sell your products you are in the wrong business.

Step 4

Trust... Shoppers need to be reassured that you are a real and legitimate business. Do not hide your phone number, do not use non domain based email addresses (GMail for example) and even if you are using PayPal... Get an SSL to protect your shoppers while checking out. You see, if your site is usable and logical to navigate, most people will not call.... But even most of these same people will remember whether or not they noticed your phone number. This is because shoppers use the prominent display of your phone number as a measurement of your business' trustworthiness and level of quality and support.

Step 5

Simple and transparent shipping rules. Flat rate or free shipping is going to be the most effective marketing option for your store. So if you can manage free shipping or flat rate deals like $7.95 shipping and orders of $75.00 free, then advertise it prominently on your store. If you need to use regular rated by weight or price shipping make the information readily available. Create an easy page and post your rates in plain sight. Also, consider enabling the shipping rates to display on the shopping cart page. Check this out in your Zen Cart admin under Configuration >> Shipping/Packaging >> Shipping Estimator Display Settings for Shopping Cart >> Set to 2 (Display as Listing on Shopping Cart Page).

It's rather unfortunate that online shoppers as a whole have the "eBay disease", but they have been getting screwed on shipping for 10 plus years and you must now carry that burden as a shop owner.

Step 6

Create custom Meta Tags and titles for your pages. While none of the modern search engines use the Meta keyword tag to rank pages.... There is no harm in including 10 or less lowercase, comma separated keywords in your pages. The Meta description should be 250 characters (counting spaces) or less and be written in natural text. The search engines will not be using your Meta description to rank your page, rather this is your sales opportunity to get shoppers to click through from the search results pages. So logically speaking, if you were seeking a person to do Zen Cart SEO for you which result from the search page below would you select?

Ours

OR

Edited to Protect the Innocent

Lastly, and the single most important on page factor is your Title. Many will call this a Meta title, it's not a Meta tag... But okay. This <title></title> should be pretty natural language, 65 characters or less (including spaces) and 100% relevant to the PAGE'S content. Note that not every page has the same content, so adding site wide tag lines and such only lowers the relevancy in  your title. These titles and descriptions should be unique for every page and NEVER the same for pages.

Step 7

You will need a proper robots.txt to stop Google an other search engines from crawling duplicate and other pages that are not valuable for search. Pages like your contact page for example or your privacy policy clearly hold no value to Google and their searchers. Proper formatting of this document is crucial... So read up and learn the rules, restrictions and syntax to do it properly. Note, however, and I don't care what anyone else has told you.... Your robots.txt WILL NOT prevent indexing or remove indexed pages. To acheive this you will need a noindex tag in the page in question.

Step 8

Create a search engine sitemap. A search engine sitemap is an XML document that helps the search engines find your pages more easily. This document IS NOT for your human visitors and DOES NOT in anyway force the search engines to index these pages.

Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. For example, we won't crawl or index image URLs contained in your Sitemap. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.

I have some quick tips to get you started:

1. Unless you have more than 50K pages, you need only one sitemap... according to Google.

A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.

2. This sitemap is NOT for humans and requires no menu, styles or anything else to prevent the search engines from reading it fast! Have a look at ours http://pro-webs.net/sitemap.xml

3. Redirected pages cannot be included.

4. Using the same priority for all pages will cause the search engines to ignore the priority all together.

5. Duplicate urls for the same page cannot be included.

6. You cannot include pages blocked in your robots.txt or which contain a noindex tag.

7. Submitting your sitemap with the daily attribute will not make Google crawl faster... this is not an instruction, but rather a helpful technique to let the search engines know how often you create content.

8. Add your sitemap to all of the following webmaster's tools: Google, Yahoo and Bing. Please note that continually resubmitting your sitemap in these platforms is not only a waste of time, but can land you in a mess. Instead use the proper auto discovery protocol in your robots.txt...

Sitemap: http://pro-webs.net/sitemap.xml

Step 9

Shopping Feeds will jump start your traffic with valid and relevant sales leads. Many of these feed sites are in fact free. Checkout our list of free feed sites and consider installing the necessary modules for at least Google Shopping. Make sure you also add your Google Base feed to Yahoo!

Step 10

Coupons. People love coupons and saving money. Your Zen Cart makes creating and tracking coupons very easy with no additional software or modifications! So create a coupon for CouponMountain for example, but call it something EASY and unique to Coupon Mountain, "MTN" for example. So now this coupon you submitted for free can easily be tracked for its effectiveness =).

Step 11

Business Listings will not only help to rank your site, but in fact validate your business in the eyes of the shopper. Start with Google Local, Bing Local Businesses and Yahoo Business as well. These are high quality listings for your business that really improve your visibility and shopper's trust factor. They are free too.

Step 12

Building links for your website NEVER, EVER stops. Build links for your shop by submitting to web directories, commenting on blogs, adding them to your email signature, forum sigs and anywhere you can drop a link without spamming. Do not swap links or buy links. Buying links can end your business, when you are penalized for manipulated Google's PageRank system and swapped (reciprocal) links are only devalued, but may in the future be penalized by Microsoft/Bing...

There you have it... The tools to make your Zen Cart rock. I realize that there are other ways, but remember this is your business and the risk of not playing by the rules is high and can cost you everything.

Payments

The process of getting paid from your shopping cart software via a credit card transaction can be a very confusing process for those just getting started. The convenience offered to your shoppers by your ability to transact in credit cards is second only to the genuine increase in the ability of your store to make a sale. If you haven't started accepting credit cards yet, you are missing the boat.

Below is a very simplified flow of the transaction, followed by a more detailed description to help you better understand.

Your Customer is connected to the Internet
The Internet is connected to the Transaction Server
The Transaction Server is connected to the Processing Network
The Processing Network is connected to your Customer’s Bank

Now, the flow of how you actually get paid for the item purchased in your online store with a credit card.

Your Website is connected to the Internet
The Internet is connected to the Transaction Server (Gateway)
The Transaction Server is connected to the Processing Network (Merchant Account)
The Processing Network is connected to the Your Bank

Both consumers and the merchants are connected to the shopping cart through very similar channels, but like blood pumping through your body the consumer follows the links from checkout to confirmation and the information flows through the Transaction Server, Processing Network and customer bank before it flows back through to the seller through the Transaction Server, Processing Network where the money is deposited in the merchant’s bank. But, amazingly this entire transaction only takes a few seconds.

All shopping carts processing credit card sales are required to use properly encrypted technology to preserve the integrity of the consumer's online purchase. This means that a customer’s credit card information is not in danger of being exposed and used by a third party.

This is very important because the success of any ecommerce store relies heavily on privacy and security. A reputable and properly supported shopping cart system is a must for any online store.

The truth is, all your shopper really wants is to be certain that their information is safe, know that your business has a good reputation and that their purchase was successful. Most will never know or even care how exactly this magic is accomplished. The use of a secure shopping cart, the attention to the reputation of your firm and great communication will yield happy shoppers.

You’ve worked hard to provide a quality product and build your store. You’ve worked to optimize your shop for search engine success and you supply excellent information to your site's visitors.... Be a shame to lose the sale because you haven't properly executed your customer's transaction with a critical level of care and security . Always make sure you have a secure shopping cart for your shoppers, and they may just reward by coming back..... Or telling a friend!

Building Natural Keywords

Keywords, keywords, keywords.... Everybody says it, but hardly anybody understands it!

Fact is in our business I STRONGLY discourage our customers from "adding" keywords to their pages. I really have a fair and just reason for this. When shop owners set out to "add" keywords to their product descriptions for example, then end up shooting themselves in the foot... Most times. How? I'm going to tell you why.

First of they end up stuffing that key phrase "green bananas" in to their content an obscene amount of times... Making truly terrible copy, a poor shopper's experience and inevitably screwing themselves out of a ton of very effective long tails. No gripe to the shop owners at all, its very challenging to create content with is both optimized and user friendly. As human beings we tend to have a one track mind... So concentrating on both is like a interior designer telling the HVAC contractor how to plan the duct work.

There are many ways to do both more effectively... Things like usability studies and deep effective long tail keyword research will yield far better results. However, the short and narrow of it is to create usable content. Other wise you might win the battle and lose the war!

I am going to give you some nuts and bolts common sense tips for optimizing your content without "shooting yourself in the foot". At the end of the day, no ranking metric matters if you cannot convert a sale in your online store.

Common Sense Tips for Writing SEO Copy

Remember that search engines see pages as pages... They are not necessarily ranked as a "whole" site so to speak. Keep your pages (no matter what page) targeted and on track. Optimize your content for 1 keyword phrase and it's variations (long tails). The broader your page's content the more difficult to rank the page.... Every page counts!

One you have chosen your key phrase to optimize for (YES that phrase, not keyword), then you will want to determine the stemmed keywords and phrases for this key phrase. For example, if we choose the key phrases "fresh green bananas" we know that using other variations like "green bananas", "bananas", "fresh bananas" and such will build the relevance and strength of the key phrase. When I explain this to a customer I use a pyramid to explain how the longer related key phrases (long tails) actually support and build the "bigger box" or higher volume target phrase. The image below may give a better understanding.

Keyword Pyramid

You will honestly be created page content to target only 1 keyword phrase. The other long tail phrases are used to built the supporting relevance for the main target. Many times there will be phrases that do not even contain the exact targeted words that will be used to support the main phrase. For example, if you are targeting "Zen Cart SEO", you will also be using phrases like: "Zen Cart optimization", "SEO for Zen Cart"... and other logical phrases. These phrases using only part of none of the targeted keyword are "stemmed" from the target. So in other words, these phrases are different but mean the same or similar.

Natural. If you write your text in such a way that it seems unnatural, customers will think you are dumb or irresponsible.... Not exactly the trust building response we want. Saying things like "green dog jacket are warm and best jacket for dog". See how the singular version of keywords were used as opposed to the more natural sounding and expected plural versions? Fact is, search engines will stem most every word you use to include the plural or singular versions without any spammy stuffed intervention from you. Your job is to write intelligent, digestible and helpful text for your customers.... Thus impressing them with the ease of shopping on your website and setting forth your own authority or expert status with regard to your products and niche.

So the other piece to this puzzle is delivering your shoppers the information and encouragement they need to buy your products. This is EXACTLY why we tell our customers to write for their shoppers! You see, if we can get them to write excellent and helpful product descriptions, for example, we can then properly optimize that text to build relevance and rank. This process helps to keep the shop owner's hands out of the "cookie jar" so to speak and gives us the insight and understanding of the product to properly stem and discover supporting keyword phrases.

Given this conflict, doing the entire thing yourself can really be a challenge..... But, there are some easy ways to help overcome that obstacle and double your efforts.

1. Write for the shopper first... ALWAYS. Then go back and optimize the text for supporting keyword phrases with a keen mind on not destroying the meaning of anything.
2. Have someone who knows little or nothing about your products give you an "editorial" review, then listen and act on their suggestions.
3. Be very descriptive. Creating well rounded and very descriptive text will naturally create long tails, you may have never found otherwise.... and impress your shoppers!

Product Titles

Ranking your ecommerce store is a very specific task. Your online store has the same needs.... But in many cases different techniques are used to meet the need. One of these highly important optimization techniques is creating great product page titles. Your page title is the single most important on page optimization element of any page, yet still the technique for creating a engaging and relevant title for ecommerce products is quite different from standard pages.

Take the title of this post as an example, while this is a great title for a blog post, it would be very poor for a product page. In your product page titles there are more possibilities and more specific needs for searchers. Relevancy is still the key, as an irrelevant title will not perform for you. So we have some simple and easy to implement tips below for creating highly effective product page titles which will help you rank and supply the searcher with the proper product information as well.

Product Page Title Tips

1. Relevancy : Everything is lost if your page title is not relevant to the page's content. The BEST practice is to create great, unique and descriptive text on your product pages and then craft a highly relevant title from the page. So if you want the page to rank for "green bananas", then you write about "green bananas".... Not "green tomatoes". Your page text must be unique, do not copy others page descriptions... Write great content about the product for your customers and you will be right on.
2. Length : Shorter is better.... Avoid stop and poison words like (cheap, and, if, or, the). You need to be 65 characters (including spaces) or less. This is NOT a keyword list. The words you choose should accurately describe the product and be reflected in the page text.
3. Product Info : If your prices are competitive, then including the price in the end of the title is very effective for searchers to pick the best deal directly from the search page. If your products are "Big Brand" and have a well known or searched model, SKU or MPN then include it for specific and high converting searches. Do not include your own product ID or stock number as its clearly not search able.
4. Call to Action : Your products should contain a short and relevant call to action. Adding phrases like "Free Shipping", "Guaranteed" or even things like "Eco Friendly" are great for a call to action. In lieu of these types of action phrases, phrases like "Buy Now" or "Online Ordering" are good too.
5. Ordering : The most important items are first and less important are last. The search engines read left to right also. So the product name is going to be first... then moving right the information is less important. See example below.

Apple iPod Touch 8GB MP3 Player $229.00 MB528LLA - Free Shipping

The point here is not only to deliver highly relevant title to searcher and search engines alike, but also to choose your searches better.

A great example of this is to search for "how to buy ipod apps", this is an information seeking query.... Not a good bet for a conversion. So titles like "How to Buy iPod Apps" may bring some traffic they are not looking for your products. These titles are better suited for your information and help pages within your store.

For your product pages you want to use very descriptive information in your page and titles to grab searchers who are trying to buy... or researching prices and options.... Buyers. Your product page titles are the first step and a key element in creating a highly converting ecommerce website. If they land on the right page... they are simply that much closer to buying from you. The right kind of traffic makes all the difference.

Yahoo Product Feed Submission

Yahoo has recently announced its new support for Google Base structured feeds for SearchMonkey. You can now supply your Google Base structured data feed to Yahoo for display in Yahoo enhanced results.

The program is not displaying a ton of shopping results yet, but will certainly grow. Submitting your existing Google Base formatted feed is very fast, simple and automatic. To get started verify and setup your store in Yahoo Site Explorer. After you verify your shop with a Meta tag or html file, you will see a menu option on the left for "Feeds". Upon selecting this option the following screen will be displayed...

Submit Google Shopping Feed to Yahoo

Very simply you add the "relative" path to your product feed to the feed field, then click the drop down to "Structured data feed". Add feed button saves the submission. Your product feed can be in any format that Google is currently accepting such as xml and txt. If you've never used Yahoo Site Explorer before, be certain to add your search engine sitemap & rss feeds as well. Both RSS and sitemap.xml files will be added as a "Web site feed".

This can really turn out to be a great asset to online store owners, you see Yahoo has traditionally always been a very strong search engine for ecommerce stores. Yahoo products a paid feed submission has been around for quite some time, but submitting your Google feed in Site Explorer is free and will display in regular search results.

PCI Compliance for Ecommerce

The Payment Card Industry (PCI), formed in 2006,  is a joint industry organization set up by a small group of the major credit card companies. This group is not a policing organization, and does not enforce the PCI DSS, nor set penalties for violations of the PCI DSS vulnerabilities. Enforcement of the PCI mandated requirements is left to each specific credit card company. PCI DSS does not replace the individual credit card company's compliance programs, but rather fortifies them.

It is actually the individual credit card companies, such as Visa or Mastercard, who enforce the compliance rules. While currently there is no Federal Law to force merchants to comply, many states and localities do in fact have such mandates or policies already.

PCI DSS compliance policy includes all merchants and service providers who accept, capture, store, transmit or process any credit and debit card data in any way. A compliance related incident will result in steep fines, suspension and even revocation of your card processing privileges. That's right... This IS a big deal, even for you.

Major PCI Merchant Requirements

Build and Maintain a Secure Network

• Install and maintain a proper firewall to protect cardholder data.
• Do not use vendor supplied default passwords for anything

Protect Cardholder Data

• Do NOT store cardholder data
• Encrypt all transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks

Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program

• Use and regularly update anti-virus software on all computers processing or transmitting cardholder data. This also includes your server or hosting account, office PC with processing ability and even POS systems.
• Develop and maintain secure systems and applications

Implement Strong Access Control Measures

• Restrict cardholder data to a full NEED TO KNOW level.
• Each employee, vendor or other person(s) with access MUST have a unique ID which can be logged.
• Restrict physical access to Cardholder data. This is best accomplished by again NEVER storing cardholder data.

Regularly Monitor and Test Networks

• Track and monitor access to your network resources and Cardholder data.
• Regularly test your security systems and specific processes

Maintain an information security policy

• You must maintain a company policy that addresses your information security processes, level and protocols.

Below are some very simplified, yet common mistakes we have seen companies make in in regard to their security. While, doing these things will certainly bring you closer to compliance, you will need to hire an approved scanning vendor who will scan your websites and be able to make very specific reports and lend your company compliance support more specific to your individual requirements.

1. Do not use simple usernames such as "admin" when setting up access to any software including your hosting. Never use the usernames or access information which is supplied by the software.
2. Every single vendor, employee or other personnel with access must use strong alpha numeric passwords, which also contain a symbol whenever you can. Change these every 30 days for everyone with access.
3. You must have the ability to properly log access for any user who has access to or uses your software or hosting account. This means, your hosting must have proper logging ability and your should additionally be logging access with your ecommerce software as well. These are additionally, not going to help you unless you are looking at them.
4. Each IP with access accepting or handling cardholder data must be scanned. This includes office PCs and other inventory/invoicing PCs (manned or not). DO NOT EVER use a wireless connection to access your website, hosting and certainly not to process, collect or transmit cardholder data.... It's just too vulnerable.
5. Follow the security recommendation and updates for your ecommerce software... If your software has none or lacks the ability for you to be updated either from your software or email regarding security patches and updates... Then you need new software.
6. Keep ALL of your software up to date with the most recent stable version and patches. This includes the software associated with your hosting account such as PHP and even your accounting software if integration exists or cardholder data is stored.
7. NEVER, EVER STORE CARDHOLDER DATA on your site or unencrypted hosting environment.
8. Restrict access to your software and hosting to trusted employees and vendors. Frequently review your access accounts for vendors who no longer need access and employees who are no longer with the department or your company.
9. Protect all of your site's forms properly to prevent SQL injection by submitting additional data.
10. Limit the number of shipping addresses and failed credit card transactions that customers can make on your site. Additionally, make use of velocity and IP based filters to tag and restrict suspicious transactions.
11. Perform regular vulnerability scans for all of your systems and sites.
12. You will need to create a company policy for your security procedures such as password changing, scanning and access maintenance. This needs to actually be a documented policy that can be referred to and utilized by you and your staff.
13. You are required to properly, shred and dye, or pulp ANY document containing cardholder data... This includes scratchpads for taking orders.
14. Use your hosting and PC virus scanners regularly and keep them up to date.

Remember, these are just the basics, and whatever your PCI compliance level you are likely going to need assistance to properly tackle and execute a program to bring yourself in to compliance. If you already have a network tech for your office, make sure that tech is skilled and educated for this purpose.

These regulations and related costs in time and money are part of doing business, they are not some veritable insurance policy.... Tell you what, if you cannot afford scanning and compliance you certainly cannot afford a fine for loss of electronic data from your company.

Closing Note:

I want you to clearly understand 3 very important points... So you page scanners will at least leave this site understanding these core points.

1. If you process credit cards you have already agreed to maintain PCI compliance as part of your merchant and gateway agreements.
2. This is a cost of doing business if you process credit cards and must be included in all budgeting and financial planning for your site... It's not optional.
3. If you have a PCI compliant hosting you must still maintain all of the PCI requirements for your own website, including scanning. YOU ARE NOT COVERED UNDER SOME PCI COMPLIANT HOSTING UMBRELLA.

GPL/GNU

Most of you know that we build Zen carts very regularly. Part of the draw and value of Zen Cart is its GPL license. This means a few very important things to us as a company who looks to support our customers in the best way possible. Not every company can afford a fully custom developed shopping cart software.... Just for them. The next best thing is a strong community based FREE software solution, like Zen Cart.

So Zen Cart is highly effective and very flexible. The fact that its licensing is GPL means we can mold it to better fit individual business owner's needs, thus sparing them impossible development costs for the customizations and support they need. Zen Cart accomplishes this and more. One VERY important aspect of any GPL software is its community... This is the lifeline of the support you will need and the secure future of any free software project. No community.... No future.

Zen Cart has a very active and top notch community to rely on for support, advice and even free contributed GPL software modules to make the customizing of your Zen Cart easier.  So for us... We know Zen Cart is standing by their project and that this thriving community of supporters can be relied on.

This also means that the Zen Cart Team has only donations to rely on for development, hosting and other associated costs for the free services they provide.... So when you're done reading, please buy them a cup of coffee.

So, now we have the value of GPL community supported software... What about the rules?

Simply put Zen Cart is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 2. In layman's terms the following bullet list highlights the most important pieces of the license. Here are Zen Carts remix/contribution rules.

1. Zen Cart is Open Source Software, this simply means that the code source is freely available
2. GPL is synonymous with GNU, which gives the software licensing ability to be shared
3. You can change the software without issue to suit your needs
4. Remixes and code changes MUST be distributed with the same rights with which the software was given to you
5. You cannot remove Zen Carts copyright statements within the coded documents
6. ANY remix/module which changes Zen Cart's core code is required by GPL to be released as GPL... You cannot make core changes to Zen Cart and then sell it
7. No remix or contribution is permitted to be discussed/supported in the support forum unless it has been submitted to Zen Cart in the free contributions section

So the straight and narrow of this is.... IF you edit Zen Cart or add to it, the resulting code can only be released as GNU2.0/GPL (the same rights which were granted to you) and you may not sell remixes of Zen Cart.

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

So you can make Zen Cart do the things you need, share these discoveries and reap the full benefit of very strongly supported software. Cool huh?

Ok, so many times, my partner has been called on the carpet for SELLING Zen Cart modules. These under informed and short sighted folks have not taken the time to read or understand any of this.

Recently, she had quite an email run in with the author of a freely contributed and distributed GPL module written specifically for Zen Cart. This module does in fact make core Zen Cart code changes and was released with proper GNU/GPL licensing upon submission to the free downloads section of Zen Cart.

So logically speaking after what we have learned today.... This module is free for all, Right?

Yes, absolutely. So here's the catch... No snake oil, just customer service. She offers INSTALLATION SERVICES for many freely distributed Zen Cart Modules in the normal course of her business. We also offer these services for those who need help. Not everyone can install a module and these services are necessary for many. This author of the contribution took issue with this.... He has no intention of offering up his services to install this module for free... But she should (apparently). His offense was related to the one time upfront posted fee for installing this module. He even went as far as to suggest that she only be allowed to charge hourly and her customers must email her for a price.  UHUH!

Understand that our partner and ourselves can be found supporting anyone with the desire to learn for FREE in the Zen cart forum. We have both contributed modules for Zen Cart and expect nothing in return. We both believe very strongly in the empowerment of shop owners... and go out of our way to teach, tutor and help not only our customers, but perfect strangers as well.

So, PRO-Webs will continue to offer installations of Zen Cart modules/contributions without fear, nor remorse. You see it's very simple... There is no need for concern, because if the shop owner has the time, skill set and desire.... We are more than happy to freely offer up our services in the Zen cart Community Support Forum... Along side of hundreds of additional helping hands, who also volunteer their time to help others unselfishly and without fee.