For Seo Pros: What Cart Do You Prefer? Options

[gannawdm]

I would like recomendations on a professional shopping cart that is very search engine friendly OUT OF THE BOX. Please don't recommend osCommerce, Zencart, Cubecart, or any of those open source carts. I want a cart that is "mature" in its development and is backed up by a solid company with good support. By "mature", I mean it has been developed over several years and has loads of features as a result. In another thread, a person mentioned Actinic. I checked the features on that cart and it seems like it is the type of cart I am looking for. I would like to check out other carts in it's class.

Can anybody recommend any other carts that are in the same class as Actinic? They must be as search engine friendly as possible (URLs, page structure, standards compliant, etc.).

As far as price range goes, anything under $2000 I am willing to consider.

This is a post for SEO professionals. Let's say that I want your services. If I have not developed my website at all, which shopping cart would you like me to use? Which shopping cart would make your SEO work the easiest?

If I choose CART A and in order to alter the title tags, you have to spend 12 hours modifying the code, then your services will cost me A LOT more money. Which cart would make your job easier, thus saving me money?


[Merged these two posts on very similar topics - Jill]

[Raphael]

I'm afraid I can't help you here - I custom-wrote our shopping cart/e-commerce system from the ground up.

[serpy]

I would think that you would be better of setting up a pure HTML SEO'd website that wraps around your shopping cart system. The problem with shopping carts is that they use some many variables in the url strings depending on what function the shopper is using. You could probably use mod_rewrite to create more friendly url's but I think you would be better off with my first recommendation.

[Raphael]

The problem with shopping carts is that they use some many variables in the url strings depending on what function the shopper is using.

And that's why I custom coded ours. No long query strings in our URLs, ever.

[chrishirst]

Same here custom coded a cart/catalogue system to be user/SE friendly from the ground up.

[Randy]

I know of several people, myself included, who have used x-cart to good advantage. Pretty SEO friendly out of the box, even if you leave the php variables. But they base package also allows you to create the site as a static-looking entity if you'd like.

A major plus in my book is that there is a fairly robust 3rd party development community who have created or will custom-create add on modules that will make the data positively dance if you want to do something special on the reporting side of things.

[mcanerin]

My usual fix to this is simple - I don't use shopping cart software for anything I want a search engine to see.

The only time the shopping cart (and attendant security and tracking) kicks in is when the visitor is finished browsing and has decided to make a purchase, at which point I consider it none of a search engine's business what the visitor is seeing (like their address/credit card info, etc).

It would be great to have an all-in-one package, but sometimes I think people are trying to use a hammer to do a screwdrivers job, which is why you see so many custom designed "screwhammers" being made...

<old mans voice>In my day, we handed out catalogues that everyone could look at, and then when someone wanted to order, they did so in private, with no one watching them. Young whippersnappers today tryin' to do everything all at once.. why, back in the day when I had to fix the webserver it was 10 miles to the server room, barefoot in the winter, uphill both ways...mumble, mumble </old mans voice> (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/disguise.gif)

Ian

[gannawdm]

Custom coding a cart from scratch isn't an option for me.

From an SEO perspective, I can understand how it would be beneficial if the cart doesn't kick in until a customer decides to purchase (as mcanerin stated), but the CMS aspect of shopping carts makes managing the site much easier (eg. adding products, managing products, setting prices, customer management, creating categories, etc.)

I want all of these management benefits and that's why I want a shopping cart.

Let me rephrase the question. As SEO professionals, which shopping carts have you SEO'd and which ones were the easiest or hardest to get good results.


Randy, thank you for the X-Cart recommendation. That was on my list of possibilities.

This post has been edited by gannawdm: Dec 28 2005, 01:26 PM

[cfreek]

Initial setup isn't all that easy, but have you looked into interchange?
icdevgroup.org

[gannawdm]

I'm not really looking for open source software. I'd rather pay a professional company who has a monetary interest in serving me and creating a solid product. Thank you for the suggestion though. Any others?

[Jill]

I'd rather pay a professional company who has a monetary interest in serving me and creating a solid product.

Sounds like that's what you should do then! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[gannawdm]

Any other commercial carts that I should consider besides X-Cart?

[lyn]

From the little bit I've seen, the open source options give you more flexiblity and better support than the off-the-shelf packages!


L.

[Jill]

Any other commercial carts that I should consider besides X-Cart?

Have you browsed through the other threads in this [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showforum=65]Shopping Cart Forum[/url]? Lots of suggestions have been given.

[redsonia!]

Check out the following link to SecureNetShop.com. I use it and am very happy with it. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif) Quite reasonably priced, too. It is pretty easy to use and is customizable. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/clapping.gif) It works on existing web sites. You can see it in action on my sites listed in my signature. (If some pictures show up too large in the cart, that is my fault, not theirs).

www.securenetshop.com

I've only had to use their customer service twice, but they answered promptly and were able to give me the info I needed.

Hope this helps! Let us know which cart you decide to go with.