Cactushop Sites

Anyone familiar with CactuShop shopping cart sites? Any feedback? How are they in regards to SEO?

Appalling - don't do it. I've used it. Lots of bells and whistles with it - but NOT SE friendly. Go for OsCommerce or something more adaptable.

I guess I have my work cut out for me then...lol I was hoping not to hear that answer. Any suggestions as to working with it? Can it even be done?

The problem with it is

1. Written in ASP - difficult to get a web developer who wants to script in ASP these days, most have moved to PHP.

2. The script is very 'heavy' because of all the permutations available and you will spend money just for the developer to look round it and get to grips with what it does.

3. SEO wise the url's it serves up are incomprehensive, even to Google - they were going to do a url rewrite in the latest version, but it used the custom error page - which can be heavy on server usage.

4. Only the cactushop guys, who are very good, specialise in modifying it - an open source software is far easier to find a developer to do any modifications and there are plenty of companies who specialise in OS carts, so you have more choice of developers.

It can be done, but IMO you're better spending your cash on something easier to tailor and start off with a good SEO friendly structure in the first place.

Been six months since I last looked at it so it may well have changed some, but all the mods they made over two years I used it weren't moving in the right direction.

Thanks for the in depth analysis. I guess I will have to do some more research and figure out how to handle this. Thanks doodle!

1. Loads of developers use ASP.

2. Script is quite heavy, but not unduly so in my opinion

3. The URLs it serves up (on the pro version) are SEO friendly, see eg their online demo for example, click on the menu on that and see the URLs it forms....
Product and category names in the URL, no parameters, question mark etc.

4. I found a developer who specialised in modifying it. OS commerce is free, but not worth the money in my opinion ;) Sometimes free costs more. I tried all the free stuff - free shopping carts, free hosting, free promotion. But I'm a business, I'm making money, so I'm happy to pay for something that fits the bill. Open source is great, sure I love linux. But I wouldn't give up my windows machine either.

At least there is something positive about it. I have to at least try to make it work. I do have a good developer Im working with who uses Cactushop often. Hopefully, he can interpret my idea's and make them work out. Unfortunately, the URL's are not currently friendly. I am still doing some research on how to work with it and will exhaust options before changing things around.

Are you using the latest version? Pro version of version 6?

This *does* have SEO friendly URLs, about as friendly as you can get an automated system (ie it does include some numbers too)

we were running v5 and looked at trying to mod rewrite that (and other options) but found that the new version 6 did it better than we could, and it was easier to setup (assuming you have the ability to setup a custom 404 handling page)

Currently its v5. What was upgrading like for you? What was involved? Did you lose any data? There are a ton of items in the cart and it took over a year to enter all of the products in, and that was with 3 people doing it. Maybe something was wrong with that..haha I have to make sure I'm not going to lose a lot and create more work with an upgrade. You can PM me if you want to keep the thread uncluttered. Thanks

I was talking with to a friend who is a programmer about the mod-rewrite for the urls. He said it can be done on the site but included that it would have to have some sort of number within the url. This is for product identity and to ensure the correct product is queried. My question is, how can I optimize around it? To my understanding, there is no way to eliminate the number, so where should it be put in the url? (i.e. www.domain.com/blue_widgets/555 or www.domain.com/555/blue_widgets)

You want the keyword you are optimising for at the beginning of the url - so any useless stuff such as numbers needs to go at the end i.e.www.domain.com/blue_widgets/555

I figured that, just wanted to make sure. Thanks! Will that hurt from an SEO perspective?

The 555 at the end won't - long numerical tails to url's may if someone has a better url - besides the fact it makes the url look ugly. The more concise the url is for the phrase you are targeting the better.

Understood. I will try to keep the numerical portion as short as possible. Thanks!