In order to successfully create, setup, and run an online shop you will need various things, as well as time, money, and people to build it into what you require.

The way to look at this, is no different to a physical shop. You need someone to create the shop (inside and out), People to work in the shop, and someone to manager its processes and other essentials such as sales and  marketing.

Somethings which should be focused on quite early however include:

1. A set of products, that unless you want to manually enter them, formatted preferably as a .CSV file.
2. A method to ship your customers products back to them, FedEx have a mission statement to ‘get any product anywhere’ – so perhaps that is a good place to start!
3. An E-commerce application, either bespoke, off-the-shelf, or Open Source.
4. Someone slightly, Technical to administrate your new e-shop and its products and customers.
5. Someone very Technical, to analyse, design, and development you new e-shop, and its customers and market position.
6. An Internet Marketing strategy, which obviously includes AdWords and organic S.E.O but also much more than just this.

The hardest part of setting up any e-shop or e-commerce, is working out how, why, where and to who – to sell you products to. This initial analysis is no different to a physical business, except the how part above.

1: Automated Product Uploads (into your e-store)

Most people understand that organic visitors from google is based upon the number of pages in Google’s index, as well as 99.8 other things.

Therefore with each product that you add to your e-commerce store actually become from 1-5 pages (dependent on your chosen e-commerce application or provider), it becomes obvious that owners or operators would want as many products onto the system, in most cases as quick as possible.

Automated product uploads offers this kind of result being able to upload thousands of products per second, rather per week or month!

Additionally when you have complete understand (and hence control) over the code that produces this effective, it can customised easily and powerfully, only being constrained by the programmers SQL knowledge.

The steps involved in achieving this result, or rather writing this code, is done via:

• Write .CSV file, formatted with rows full of your product information, and a zip file full of your images (correctly sized and named), with their image names referenced in the .CSV file so both items can be linked.
• Read in .CSV (ignore top header row) and build into a PHP 5 Array.
• Open DB Connection to E-Store DB, and use appropriate functionality to insert key DB Table updates.
• Confirm writes and inform user, close connections, etc.

Its that simple! If you need help, get in touch.

2: Your chosen E-Commerce Application

This the second most important thing after your products, it underpins how effective your attempts will as well as will dictate costs, both operational and technical.

Be wary of any person that states (or asserts) that “N is perfect for you to sell online and WILL get X, Y, and Z”. In our experience each new e-commerce store will need to be looked at, not to mention the market you aim to enter as well as the processes involved to get you products sold and to the customer.

All of this should be carefully looked at with stake holders and full requirements being created. Many business and therefore people fail with e-commerce for reasons that include the most basic business skills such as business and marketing plans, not to mention customer and market analysis.

Like any shop, if people don’t walk past your shop then they definitely wont shop, and if they don’t shop they definitely wont buy! SWOT analysis and a basic marketing plan is ESSENTIAL  if you want to survive and grow in the online marketing place, with documented grows at over 20% per anum.

So what has been the result? If I were to tell you that we have now purchased 5 modules then you should get an idea of how effective we feel that this has been! Additionally, if you were to know that I myself have created bespoke PHP5 code to handle search engine friendly URLs (SEF URLs) and yet have still have advised purchasing this module (mainly because we are using OS Commerce) then the answer should be beginning to take shape.

Magic SEO (for OS Commerce) is clearly not only effective but well written, and I guess, more importantly well supported. If you contact the owner and author, Jiri, within a very small space of time you will confirm the excellent level of support and help given to get this module up and running.

Jiri, was not only helpful and advised on un-related matters, such as Zend Optimiser (or Optimizer, for you Americans!) but also on support to get the module installed on your hosting setup. Indeed, the initial hosting that we were using was causing problems; the solution, Jiri fully supported and helped us to get this module successfully installed and setup on our e-shop.

Now after installing and setting up this module a number of times, I am pleased to say that in 99.9999% of all cases in takes just around a couple of minutes to get going. So, I personally would recommend this module, and have, and would definitely rate this as essential!

The main reason that OS Commerce is simple to use and modify is based on the fact that it has been built using procedural PHP 4 (whereas nowadays most applications such as Magento are built using object oriented PHP 5 which is far more complex).

If you are an owner or manager then you may be wondering what exactly is procedural PHP 4? In some respects this does not matter apart from the fact that there are far more procedural PHP 4 programmers around than OO PHP 5 (which is currently very in demand with high wages). Additionally if you are a programmer (in any language) then you should be able to tell the main constructs e.g. sequence, selection, and iteration. This of course holds for most common languages including Javascript, Java, ASP, VB, and others.

Okay so we explained the logic of using OS Commerce to build your new E Commerce shop, hopefully! What we shall do now is start from the ground upwards so that you can get an idea of the best way to set this up either from scratch, via a control panel, or to modify an existing install.

If you are using a control panel such as Plesk or CPanel then all you will need to do is follow the on-screen instructions, apart from the step when it requires to enter the database user and user password. Just follow the same instructions as we give for the installation from scratch.

If you already have a pre-installed version of OS-Commerce (by any method) then you can ignore all these parts and move straight on to the section: Configuration of OS-Commerce.

Installation of OS Commerce

In order to install OS-Commerce, or in-deed most Open source applications, you will need to provide a database (table) setup and ready to be used by  the application. To put it simply, all the information (customers, products, etc) that is used by the application will be saved into the database and hence this is critical to the running of OS-Commerce.

Additionally what you will also require are the actual files that make up the application (usually in the many thousands). In most cases including OS-Commerce you will download these files as a Zip or Rar file. If you have not come across .rar files before then note that they are similar to .Zip files.

If you have not come across either, then all you need to know is that compressed (.rar or .zip) files are nothing more than all the files squashed together to make the final size of the files (much) smaller. If you don’t currently have an application that will open these files then feel free to download the excellent (free) 7 Zip

>> 7 Zip Compression

Once you have the compressed file (.zip or .rar) then you will need to expand it (using an application such as 7Zip) however you now have 2 choices where to expand it. You can either expand it on your desktop (locally) and then upload all the files, or upload the compressed file and then expand it in place.

Personally I would upload the compressed file and then expand it in place. The reason that I say this is because there are few problems that can happen when using the other method. If you are having issues trying to upload all the many files then take a read to see if any of these problems seem to be affecting you issue.

The first problem that can happen is that the server (or web hosting space) that you are using has restricted the number of files that can be viewed (and even uploaded). The problem normally goes as follows. You select all the files and then start to upload them, however before they finish you notice that some of the files didn’t upload. The second problem is that you have uploaded all the files correctly, however when you try and view them you notice that some of them are missing.

Another problem of uploading individual files is the fact that it will take far longer; Now I am not saying this is the wrong thing to do as even I may some-times upload files individually (for a specific reason), however it is something that you should definitely be aware of; the alternative method that is.

The best or rather quickest method is to upload the compressed file, expand it using the server (either the control panel or via UNIX commands), and then (if it is not in the correct place) to move it; obviously it makes more sense to move it to the correct location before you expand it, something which cannot always be done.

So no matter which method you have followed, you will now have the files in place. If you used the control panel to do the installation then all this is really has done is moved the correct files into the correct location; Please note that often the files that have been installed by the control panel may be out of date.

Now you will need to setup the database user and user password; more to follow.

Configuration of OS Commerce

More to follow.

If you are wondering how effective our OSCommerce SEO has been then you should note that the best SEO results we have so far achieved were page 1 out of 77 million SRP (search result pages) which is obviously very good! The search term that we achieved this for was “Home Furniture”, and the other companies around us on page 1 were Ikea, Debenhams, Tesco Direct, Argos, & Marks and Spencer.

If you are wondering if we managed to achieve this using OSCommerce then you will pleased to note that we did, which basically goes to show how powerful (in terms of SEO) this e-commerce application can be. Although saying this, clearly if we had used a much more modern application such as Magento – then we probably would have only have had to put in around 50% of the SEO effort which of course equates to time and capital.

However before you jump ship to Magento you should note that Magento is built using object based PHP 5 and therefore the trade off is that some of the simple hacks that you can do with OSCommerce become complicated with Magento. Also another key issue to remember is that procedure PHP programmers are far cheaper and in more supply than object based PHP 5 programmers!

Okay let us know take a look at some of the stuff you can do with OSCommerce to make it more effective in terms of SEO.

The first thing that is absolutely key to effective SEO using OSCommerce is categories, or rather creating the correct categories for your industry. This is not only very important to make your shop intuitive to use (and hence help’s your potential customers to find the correct products) but also for SEO keywords.

In our opinion the best thing to do is to keep the main set of categories as generic as possible and then drill down for subcategories. We would also highly recommend that you do not do categories deeper than 2 levels, for many reasons, including most themes not being able to handle them.

Just to be clear let us give you some examples using the format: Category 1 -> Sub Category

Mirrors -> Ornate Mirrors | Bedroom Furniture -> Mirrors

As you can see from above there are many ways you can structure your categories; some shops will structure them by products such as Mirrors and Ornate Mirrors, whereas others will structure them on Room and then furniture.

I guess it all depends really on how you expect  your customers to find your products. If you were to perform professional analysis on this (to get the best solution) then you would take a look at which keywords have the most search results per month and go with this.

Now this is where more modern applications start to take the lead somewhat. Ideally you not only want product type, but also room type, material type, and even cost. Doing this allows the customer to search for products in the way they want and unfortunately OSCommerce (so far, without plug-ins) cannot do this. This is of course way Magento shines due to not only tags but also product attributes.

There are many more ways you can modify oscommerce to make your shop SEO far more effective. Below we outline a few that we hope to expand at a later date. If however you run your own OSCommerce online store and are desperate to make your SEO more effective leading to more sales, then why not bring in nCoded to achieve this? Just get in touch.

• <h> tags
• Category link backs
• Related Category link backs
• Product header hacks
• Fancy URLs
• Google SiteMaps
• Keyword Searching
• Faux Magento