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yes, SEO is what I am worried about with my provider -- I hope his team will do a lot more than just submitting to search engines. if not, you can just get someone else from elance to do it for like 20 bucks =)

Lol, good luck with that. :)

If you want an independent shopping cart (not a hosted cart that charges monthly), zen cart has a lot of payment modules.

Got traffic but takes work
 

My website is around 15 months old. I prowl SEO forums and basically do everything I read there to generate traffic, sometimes leaving it alone for a few weeks, sometimes working on it every day for weeks on end.

You need a cart that makes it easy to submit to different search engines and shopping sites. Google/froogle, yahoo, shopmania, thisnext, thefind, live, and a lot of others. Register and claim your "brand" on Kaboodle.

You need to submit XML sitemaps (for free) to Google and Live. Yahoo charges for that now.

You need to run CHEAP PPC campaigns: Google and Yahoo are freaking expensive, 30 cents and up for my niche. I use 7Search and LookSmart and pay 3 cents and up for the same ads.

You need to post in dozens of forums, using your website in your signature. Do that in forums that get spidered (not this one LOL). The spiders will read your signature and it will count as a backlink.

Find websites that have cheap ads. $10-30 a month. In your niche, of course! If you sell power tools, prowl the power tool forums and blogs, look at their ads. Go to Alexa and see if they have good traffic. Buy ads on those sites.

Search Yahoo Answers for questions about your niche. Answer them and point to your website. "Hey, I found a great one of those at NotAtAllCrooked.com! They shipped it to me really fast and their customer service is the best!". Like that. Also answer questions without referring to your site, and refer to your site as well as 2 or 3 others to cover your tracks. If your answer is picked as best it will be permanently visible and spidered by Google constantly. If not, it will get spidered until it's buried, so no loss.

There are lots of other things to do, the only trick is to do them all, constantly. It's dreary, boring, deadly dull work, and very disheartening because you don't see results. but keep at it and it will finally pay off.

I know my various approaches are working because now I get orders even when I do no promotion at all, so people are finding me somehow. When I run ad campaigns I get more orders. My site is higher in organic listings and I show up in searches for my products. In fact, because of my PP issue I had to turn off the cart and stopped all my ads. I got emails from people complaining that they couldn't buy! So, I turned it on with check/money order as the only payment method, sure that would stop the emails. To my amazement I've gotten 4 orders with people sending me MO's through the mail!

Of course, your site has to not suck too! Test it in FF and IE. Get SSL so people feel safe checking out, and put some kind of protection shield on every page so it's in their face. If you have a decent cart it is already optimized for SEO, so you don't have to do a lot on the coding side.

I'm leaving out the obvious traffic/spider tricks like Facebook, blogging, MySpace and Twitter. Those sites make my brain dribble out through my ears and give me a headache in my eye and I avoid them like the clap. But if you can stand them at all they are very good resources.

Nice tips TapTapper, and yes this stuff is boring to do, try researching best ways of generating backlinks as I'm doing now, boring stuff.

You can also build web 2.0 pages/mini blogs with hubpages, squidoo, etc and link back to your selling site.

Also look for blogs that are high page rank with dofollow links, here are some edu backlinks for nike, replace nike with whatever you want to target.

Also utilize top sites for even more backlinks. The more backlinks you have with the anchor text you're trying to rank for in Google like 'nike shoes', the better your placement in SERPs for that keyword will be.

Boring sh*t really.. but necessary.

You need a cart that allows product Attributes. Open source of course. Skip PrestaShop, it's a nightmare. Magento and Zen Cart allow attributes. In zc you can add a free module that will manage different images for indiv attributes. Check out the zc forums, you'll see a lot of people selling clothing and custom-made stuff that use the attribute features extensively.

Since you have coding experience, I say go for a zen site! If you live and breathe XML then you could do Magento too. Even though I'm a coder I don't want to spend my life writing XML, so my Magento site is on permanent hiatus.

Aspkin/TapTapper,

This is ALL very good info. I see that TapTapper prefers ZenCart, what about you Aspkin?

:pop2:

I recommend CS-Cart.com shopping cart.

You can also advertise on Facebook, they now have a PPC program. It's the same result for me though, lots of cash paid and lots of clicks but not many sales. My sites may not have been good enough. Good Luck but it's hard to beat the traffic of FEEBAY

Does CS-Cart have similar attribute properties as ZenCart?

Check it out.. Overview :: CS-Cart :: Shopping Cart Software and Ecommerce Solution

It's one of the best shopping carts I've seen.