7 replies to this topic

[Brian Turner]

I'm looking at implenting an ecommerce site solution for a client, but I'm not altogether aware what my options are.

Ideally, the software package will be already search engine friendly, but I can always mod_rewrite something as necessary.

Not an area I normally dabble in, but a client with an existing ecommerce site wants an upgrade.

Any suggestions welcome.

[Randy]

Are you referring to a shopping cart Brian?

Most of those are pretty SE Friendly these days, or if they're not that way out of the box they can be made to be friendlier with minor tweaks. Most cover the basics pretty well --no forced Session IDs, limited number of query parameters, no forced cookies, the ability to have unique Titles/Headers/etc.

So it's really getting to a point where it's more important to make sure the cart back end supports whatever you need it to do. eg Multiple Manufacturers, statistics/reports, easy to maintain, etc. Which of course is almost all about personal preference.

[Brian Turner]

Thanks for the reply, Randy - I guess what I'm really looking for is recommendations.

Does anybody (or their clients) use particular ecommerce solutions that work well for them?

In case it helps, I've been told to look at cordless-phones.uk.com as a comparison. It looks like it's had a mod_rewrite solution applied, but the overall features on the site look very nice. Something that offers similar would be a good starting point, but there's no pointers in the code (that I've found) suggesting what package (if any) was used for it.

[Randy]

Well, lately I've been kind of partial to x-cart. Though I freely admit it's for reasons totally unrelated to SEO.

I like it for busier sites because you can have it produce static pages that are based upon the information in the database, thus easing potential server strain if you're dealing with a busy site/server. I've also gotten used to their templating system, so it's easier for me to create one-off designs. There are also some really talented folks out there who crank out very useful 3rd party add-on modules.

It's just a personal preference, but that's what you asked for.

[lisety]

Brian,
Do a search on highrankings because it wasn't too long ago that there was a thread here about this same thing. A bunch of ones were listed but I don't remember which ones.
Lise

[Jill]

Yep, I've moved this to the Shopping Cart Forum, which is where you should find all the other discussions on this topic as well.

[torka]

I like ShopSite for many of the same reasons Randy cited for X-Cart -- static HTML catalog pages, I'm used to the template system, good third-party addon modules available.

--Torka

[SanDiegoMedia]

I have been having very good success with osCommerce lately.