OpenCart 1.4: Beginner's Guide

OpenCart is a popular open source shopping cart solution and provides elegantly written tools to establish a fully functional online store from scratch in a very short time with intuitive screens. It can be a difficult task for beginners to go beyond the basics and apply all the features, which they will require for their businesses.

This practical book gives you hands-on experience on using and managing OpenCart, helping you start feature-rich, professional online stores easily. It also teaches you how to organize your online store effectively in terms of products, payments, shipping, orders, and customer relations.

OpenCart 1.4 Beginner's Guide will teach you how to build a store that can take control of all the online shopping needs. You will be able to run multiple shops in a single installation. You will learn how to set up products and correctly organize in categories. You will correctly integrate a payment gateway and shipping method after reading the comparisons and applying the examples. You will learn how to define taxes and apply them according to the geolocation of a customer. This book also teaches you how to manage orders and customers. You can impress your customers and increase the availability of the website to more people with the help of this practical guide. Additionally, the book also teaches you how to use design templates and apply SEO (search engine optimization) to make the store more visible for search engine queries.

Explore OpenCart—build robust shopping websites with high-level functionality.

What you will learn from this book :

• Install OpenCart correctly, explore different online store organization models, and choose the one that suits your needs
• Create categories, products, product options, and assign their advanced parameters
• Manage taxes with geo zones and link them to products
• Configure store settings, including welcome message, currencies, languages, modules, themes, SEO links, and so on
• Different payment models, including Bank Transfer, PayPal, Cash on Delivery, Money order, Authorize.net, and so on
• Enable one or more shipping methods, including free, flat rate, weight-based, per item, UPS, and USPS
• Apply product discounts, create coupon codes, set special prices for sales in bulk
• Manage orders and change statuses, print invoices, and so on
• Grouping and managing customers, sending e-mail newsletters and managing OpenCart administration panel with multiple users with different permission levels
• Localize your online store by adding new languages and currencies, and correctly upgrade current OpenCart system

Approach
This is a tutorial-style book that follows a practical approach to demonstrate the potential of OpenCart. The book is suitable for those who have basic computer skills.

Written with a fast-paced but friendly and engaging approach, this Packt Beginner's Guide is designed to be placed alongside the computer as your guide and mentor. Step-by-step tutorials are complemented with explanations of the reasoning behind what you are doing. You will quickly pick up the necessary skills, tips and tricks for building a successful OpenCart online store with practical examples that helps you to learn by experiment and play.

Who this book is written for
This book is aimed at individuals who want to develop professional online stores without any hands-on programming experience, and clients/non-developers who will be managing their inventory and processing orders through the backend.

About the Author
Murat Yilmaz is a software developer, and online entrepreneur who lives in Moscow. Murat has over 10 years of experience in different IT fields including development of web driven solutions, database and OLAP systems and has worked in several international companies in Istanbul (Turkey), Anchorage (Alaska), and Moscow (Russia) as a consultant. He currently runs his own blog and online advertising network. He holds a bachelor degree in Computer Science, Marmara University at Istanbul. He spends his free time playing progressive rock songs on the guitar and enjoys writing for his gadgets and technology blog at vubx.com.

He is also author of OpenX Ad Server Beginner's Guide from Packt, which teaches people about building and maintaining professional, online advertising solutions for their web sites.