New Website and Shopping Cart

[lar45]

Hi everybody. My wife has been working on making us a better website http://www.lsstuff.com
with a regular shopping cart http://www.lsstuff.com/store/

This is the first one she has done and is learning as she goes. If you see items that need attention or fixed, we would appreciate your feedback. One item we are trying to figure out is the shipping cost. We want to keep your cost down and not over charge for shipping on multiple items. The items decription should have a note on how many will fit in which container. We appreciate your patience while we sort out the details.

Thanks
Glenn & Leah Larsen

[white eagle]

I think its real nice
so nice I ordered 20 tubes of BAC.....
its nice to put a face to the lube
thank you

[codeNshoot]

Looks like you're off to a good start.

I have some experience with zen cart, shoot me a pm, maybe I can give you a hand if you run into trouble or have a question.
I wrote a few payment modules and changed a couple of templates. Nothing too crazy, but let me know if I can help.

[turbo1889]

If you and your wife want to it is possible to make your shipping selection nearly fully automatic instead of trusting the customer to figure out what will fit and won't fit for the shipping options based on the information provided in each listing.

Since you are using USPS flat rate shipping options, specifically the two options of the flat rate envelope and the (medium size?) flat rate box what one would do is designate an additional field of generic volume units for each item right along with the price that are merely the fraction of the space inside of a full envelope or box that the item occupies.

For example:

According to the information on your web-site you can fit:
----- 100 regular size lube sticks packed in bags in a flat rate box
----- 70 regular size lube sticks packed in tubes in a flat rate box
----- 18 2x6 commercial lube sticks in a flat rate box
----- 5 plastic quart bottles of X-lox in a flat rate box

Therefore, the shipping volume for flat rate box shipping assigned to each of those items would be:

----- 0.0100 (1/100) for regular size lube sticks packed in bags
----- 0.0142 (1/70) for regular size lube sticks packed in tubes
----- 0.0555 (1/18) for 2x6 commercial lube sticks
----- 0.2000 (1/5) for plastic quart bottles of X-lox

Thus when a customer puts 2 @ quart bottles of X-lox and 40 @ regular sticks of BAC lube in his cart the computer adds up the volume of such an order in terms of the volume of a flat rate box and finding the volume = 0.9680 it knows that it will all fit in a single flat rate box and assigns that shipping charge.

If, however, the customer instead puts 15 @ 2x6 commercial sticks of CR and 50 @ regular solid sticks of 50/50 in his cart the computer adds up the volume of such an order in terms of the volume of a flat rate box and finding the volume = 1.3325 it knows that such an order will not fit in a single flat rate box and informs the customer accordingly and tells the customer that if he/she is going to pay for two flat rate boxes shipping charge they might want to finish filling up the second box since it is only 1/3 full.


It would be just like those web-sites that charge for shipping by weight and list the weight of each item and add up the weight at checkout to determine the shipping charge only since your shipping flat rate where volume is what counts not weight you are just using fractional volume instead.

You could either do a second set of numbers for the smaller flat rate envelopes and give the customer the choice. (Your order will fit in either 3 envelopes or 1 flat rate box;Please choose your desired shipping) Or you could simply assign the volume of the envelope to be some fraction of that of the flat rate box such as 0.2000 (1/5).

Anyway it's a thought.

[David Bachelder]

I have a .com business. I paid Stamps.com for printing postage and another company for shopping cart fees. I was spending about $500.00 per year on just those two things.

Then I started using PayPal.
Free Postage printing.
Free credit card acceptance.
Free shopping cart.

PayPal is now saving me $500.00 a year.

Check it out.

I do not work for PayPal or get any kind of kickback from them at all. I'm just sharing what I have learned.

[Dean D.]

Great start on your new website Leah. I'll have to give the store a try soon!

[williamwaco]

Excellent job.

Zen Cart is very popular with the people I know.

Also only one broken link in the whole site.

Broken links, ordered by page:
http://www.lsstuff.com/lsstuff-stuff
http://gator159-lar4570-primary.hgsitebuilder.com/mailto:WhiteLabelSales@aol.com
\_____ error code: 404 (not found)

I am looking for a new web development system. I am now using the Microsoft Expression Web. If you used one, I would be interested in knowing what system you used.

[Junior1942]

Main page photo erinlrscoutday004.jpg is almost 2M in file size. It should be ~2k.

Store page 20010.jpg is ~2.5M and should be maybe 1k.

All photos on the store page are way too big in file size. You need to thumbnail the photos and link to the full size version. If, for example, you put a 500 x 500 pixel photo in a 50 x 50 box the small picture is the same file size as the big picture. The box just squeezes it down.

[RobsTV]

Just used it last week, and great service. Thanks!

However, anytime a username and password are created, the site should be secure.

Paypal adds a level of security, but a general username and password are requested while unsecure, before going to secure paypal login.

[lar45]

Thanks for the input.
I just put the shopping cart to go by weight, but the volume sounds like a better idea.
I'll work on shrinking the images.
Thanks again
Glenn.