Switching from Amazon Webstore to Zen Cart for Ecommerce

Last year, my wife and I bought a brick-and-mortar toy store.  One of our first priorities was to improve the existing online store to boost sales.  The online store was hosted by a company named Volusion for about $89 per month.  Unfortunately the previous owner only had ten products listed for sale because it took so much time to upload all the details and pictures for each item.

I had a feeling that the $89/mo plan by Volusion could be replaced by cheaper options, so I began looking around.  After a huge amount of research, I signed up for in Webstore by Amazon.   Amazon charges $49 per month, plus 7% of sales.

Amazon’s webstore was fairly easy to set up, but it did take some time to master their system.  Amazon had a couple methods for bulk product uploads, but I found them to be extremely buggy.  The product upload desktop application crashed and constantly became hung up.

After a couple months in operation, I received a letter from Amazon that they sent to all toy sellers.  They said that they had certain requirements for toy sellers to operate during the holiday season.  The requirements included a sales history of at least 25 items, with returns and complaints under a certain percentage.  Sellers that didn’t meet the requirements would be “locked out” during the holiday season.  These requirements seemed unfair because the Christmas selling season is the most important for a retailer.  More importantly, if a seller got locked out, you would have to go through the trouble of setting up a website somewhere else, which could require a massive time commitment at the worst possible time of year.

I began to look around at other shopping cart solutions.  Amazon had excellent US-based customer service, but I had some serious problems with the way they operated.  For example, Amazon refused to collect sales tax, saying it was the responsibility of the seller.  From the buyer’s point of view, this is an incredibly good benefit.  From the seller’s point of view, this was a bad thing because you either skirt the law and don’t pay the tax, or you pay the tax as an expense from already-slim margins.

I found the default webstore themes to be better than those provided by Volusion.  (With most providers, you can pay more money for custom templates and web designs).   Despite my best efforts, I found it hard to make my webstore look really professional.  Amazon allows webstore owners to customize alot of the nuts and bolts of the store, but I didn’t want to spend upwards of a couple thousand dollars to create a really sweet store.

Overall, I found that  Amazon’s $49 monthly fee really chewed up my earnings because we didn’t make many sales online. Despite my best efforts to drive traffic to the site, I wasn’t able to lift the trend line in traffic.  I had learned the hard way that the online toy business is very competitive and price sensitive.  Many online merchants offered our products for sale at about the same price we buy the product from our suppliers.   We couldn’t match those prices because when you took out the 7% Amazon commission, we lose money on the sale.

With my increasing interest in web programming and Content Management Systems (CMS’s), I was open to taking on an open source product.  I found a great article at: http://webtecker.com/2008/04/22/8-best-open-source-shopping-cart-solutions/

I considered Open Cart, and even downloaded the software on my home laptop with a web server built in.  I was immediately surprised by a number of Php errors relating to the phasing-out of some language keywords in the version being used.  I did some googling of the problem, and found a solution buried in a message forum board.  The simpliest fix required changing the wording for language errors.  However, the damage was done: I thought it was bad form to allow a user to download a major piece of software without warning the user with an installation FAQ or something.

I next settled on Zen Cart.  It seemed to be less buggy than Open Cart.  I learned that Zen Cart was a spin-off or break-away by osCommerce, another open source solution.  Since then, Zen Cart has matured into its own.

In the next article, I’ll explain how I downloaded and installed Zen Cart.  Keep cheeking back for updates to this story.