Where do I go next?

Make the path to checkout as streamlined as possible.

Zen Cart answer

You know those little links up top for the default Zen Cart that say home and login?  Did you get rid of that?  Take another look.  That is not a set of links but some scripting that can be managed to improve the buying experience.

First, once you put something in the shopping cart, new links appear for the cart and checkout.  Once you login, that login turns to logoff – a very important link indeed – and the my account link appears.  Now I always turn on at least the shopping cart link in addition to the login and home links.  That’s accomplished by just moving that list item outside the if statement in the template header. More about that in this post: http://deliawilsondesign.com/blog/2011/06/editing-the-login-shopping-cart-checkout-links-in-zen-cart

Many folks want those links to set next to their other cart links so sometimes folks just wipe out those header links and hard code the links they want into the header or use the header ezpage links for them.  Doing this means those links don’t change the way they need – the links change to https for the login if you have the secure cart enabled and more.

The fix?  Combine the header links (navMain) with the ezages (navEZPagesTop).  Edit the template header and the ezpages header template to accomplish this.

The truth is that you really need the shopping cart, my account and checkout links to be pretty noticeable. One option is to turn on the shopping cart sidebox – make it show up at the top of one of your columns.

You can also place that box into the header with tiny bit of included code in the template header file or search for other code bits on the forum that are possible. I’ve started putting the cart in the header and adding the checkout link into that cart box. You can see this in action at http://www.worldofclean.com and is show below.

Change from cart to checkout

So you’ve got the cart image and text, the number of items and total cost as well as the methods of payment collected together prominently displayed in the header.

And then there’s the checkout itself – yes, I know, you’ve been waiting for this one.