Thanks so much to this helpful forum and the excellent technical support of CS-Cart. I have finally moved from Interspire Shopping Cart after trying for more than a year to find an alternative. The new orders are already coming in!
(I deleted the URL for competitive reasons but feel free to PM me)
This is my 4th major e-commerce launch, every cart has been a massive disappointment. Had I not been moving domains this would have been a lot easier.
I need to do further customization of the skin, but I did a ton of work on another one and had to ditch it because it ended up being a huge mess. I will get back to that later when I am caught up on sleep.
My buddy from the ISC forum who has been using the trial, we have been helping each other with our new stores, he needs to buy the product and get on here! (Gary!)
Wow, you are quick!
Site looks good and loads fast. What more do you want?
Oyeah, orders!
Some points to improve for you… speed! Faster sites score higher in google and make customers happy.
I know I posted this before but I optimized my post a bit. So here we go…
Turn on Gzip and install smartoptimizer. This will make a difference of night and day and installation should take no more then 5 minutes.
First check here [url]http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/[/url] if your site is already using gzip or not.
Also, for the fun of it, check your site here [url]http://gtmetrix.com/[/url] and see how it gets rated. Remember this.
If gzip is not running yet see this great thread by the magnificant Lee Li Pop (aka as the speedmeister): [url]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?t=20534[/url]
In the first post she explains how to turn on the gzip.
After you have done that download smartoptimizer at [url]http://farhadi.ir/works/smartoptimizer[/url]
Then install it:
- Unzip it.
- Upload the smartoptimizer folder to your website
- The “smartoptimizer/cache” folder should be writable (in most cases 777 permission is needed).
- Open the .htaccess file that is located in the ROOT of the unzipped smartoptimizer archive and copy everything that’s in it. The file should be about 790 bytes big.
- Paste this ABOVE your current .htaccess file, the one in your main shop installation.
- Most people need to delete (or rename) the .htaccess file in the smartoptimizer folder on their server.
To prove that it works :
- First have a look yourself, you will probably notice it immediately and smartoptimizer will load some data into it’s cache so it will become faster the second visit.
- Check your site with [url]http://gtmetrix.com/[/url] again and SMILE!
P.S. If you tweak even more you can get an extra 5% or so but smartoptimizer is really the most important.
And even if you can’t enable gzip, just use smartoptimizer alone.
P.P.S. In rare cases, you need to delete the files in the cache folder that’s located inside the smartoptimizer folder. For example after editing a CSS file of your skin. So if you ever update something and you don’t see any change, try this (as well as clearing your shops cache of course). You can just delete all the files in there, SO will build new files after the first visit.
Congratulations Lauraluc,
Your site speed is very good here in the USA, so good job! 
Thanks for the tip & kind words! When things settle down I will definitely check out the optimizers. Right now I need to you know, pay bills and buy groceries.
Your site looks great! Very clean. Question for you - how did you create the informational pages?
I managed to
thanks Flow
Nice site. Very PINK!
The biggest thing is the photography. A cheap light tent would make those products look amazing. Getting better pictures is probably the best thing you can do to improve sales.
Also, the thumbnails and larger images are both loading on the product pages.
Everything works and looks good.
Great job!