Shopping Cart Software

Hi..

I want to build my website myself, using one of these shopping cart builders. (i was thinking of Miva) But, I’m worried my store won't rank high in search engines.

Are some of these programs better than others for getting good rankings?

Which are the best and worst?

Thanks.

I have always used "buy buttons" on hard coded html pages.

That gives me 100% control over the code and the page.

Lots of carts give you this option. I have done it with Yahoo Stores and paypal.

btw... i recently installed paypal cart on one of my better sites and since they have removed the requirment for a paypal membership it has been doing fine. When we made the switch I didn't notice a slowdown in orders and have had less problems than the system used before. ZERO fees, they do the security and you can get a decent transaction rate if you have a little volume.

I agree about Pay Pal. But the Dansie Shopping cart is good.
www.dansie.net
and easy for a novice (like me) to set up.

Good Luck

Another option is X-Cart. It's fully customizable (steep learning curve), it is possible to get it the way you envisioned it if you have the time or resources.

X-Cart has an option to generate HTML pages which are always good.

Cart32 has an option to let you use paypal as well as all the other credit cards.

Thanks. What's Miva Merchant like to optimize?

I don't have a good experience with shopping carts that generate a full web store. The best option is to code your self one. I do this for my customers and usually the payment systems used are PayPal and iKOBO.

Using just 'Buy Now' buttons is another alternative, but I don't like it because there are too many interactions with the payment system. And some novice web users just don't understand how they work.

Good luck!

Full eCommerce solutions are quite good nowadays and really easy to setup. Additionally, "rank wise" they will perform as well or better than static pages with buy buttons and as Content Mangement systems (CMS) you can't go wrong - big time saver for inventory/drop shipping and many plugins. Having known and optimized for about every cart system on the market they each have pluses & minuses.

OSCommerce is a good product if you savvy in open source it's free software. While it doesn't come with technical support it is used by a growing market and a forum is available and populated by current users where any problems you may have are likely answered by other that have worked through it themselves.

CAVEAT: I have one client; a mother of two, not techo savvy but knows OSCommerce inside out so the learning curve isn't really a big one.

While OSCommerce is districtly php, it is highly recommended if your sales are primarily Search Engine based as this cart is extremely search engine friendly. It also can be made W3C compliant.

Store2003 Renamed Volusion is another eCommerce cart with free setup and the above client decided to go with this one... and did her own setup as well. This cart allows html page conversion (which was her greatest concern even though I informed it didn't matter). While toll free 24 hour tech support exists I think the owners under-estimated their success as you can almost never get in contact with them but the cart is also extremely search engine friendly. It also can be made W3C compliant.

X-cart has support (but licensed software) so you pay for it. While it also emulates html conversion like Volusion there is a small problem in that the top link hierarchy is always in php - so while a search engines and visitor start out at html pages - the hole in the top level at some point switches navigation to php (and you can't get back to html). This means that search engine do not see a complete coherent website in one format or another. While clients are quite happy with the support provided and overall performance - it takes a little bit more to develop that same ranks as other carts.

X-cart appear to be a composite of OSCommerce open source software and modified for licensing.

It is interesting to note this company is Russian but to date zero problems have developed over language barriers (written or verbal), cultural differences, or technology concerns.

MonsterCommerce to be fair I highly recommended this cart to clients early on because of its apparent spotless reputation.

Be that as it may... I was surprise to find that users of MonsterCommerce do not gain access to their own FTP account -- you give this up to them on entry. This kills many alternatives to page locating/relocation (mod-rewrites and server side re-directs), and many other SEO considerations.

Additionally, by far MC is the worst cart I have seen to date for W3C Compliancy errors. While many believe this has little to do with anything - compliancy problems at 300 per page is extremely bad programming, and a 100 page website would have 30,000 compliancy errors. No matter, the bulk can not be edited unless MonsterCommerce does it themselves... and they haven't to date.

BigStep is a very inexpensive solution and basically are "buy" buttons but with a eCommerce solution in the back end - reducing the need for PalPal or WorldPay.

It's limited but effective for to money and because it is a simple script add to pages for buttons you get the benefit of what ever format you desire (static html page or anything else).

It's worth noting - while PayPal & WorldPay type solutions and still viable - you will increasingly need to break from these, or at least upgrade to fully integrated gateways allow those comfortable with PP or WP to continue using them.

Recently studies suggest the most avid online buyers - don't use websites with only PayPal. The third party processor - is one too many involved with their CC.

Thanks allot for your answers to my post. I know i'll have a solution i'm happy with soon. I did quite like the look of Searchfit? anyone have any experience with that one?

Hi chiliwack, were you able to find a solution you were happy with?

no - but if you decide to go that route - and run into problems - let me know... I can add another to the list of competencies.

Here is a link to a cart we sell and support that is search engine friendly and totally customizable - Even the dynamically generated product pages (which appear as static html through the magic of MOD_REWRITE) can have individual <title>, <meta description>, <meta keywords>, and <img alt> tags for each product.

http://www.proi.net/search-engine-f...-shopping-cart/

Thanks alot, I have a freelance client that needs a simple 100 product site. I am going too look into some of these as a solution.

I use miva merchant for my store. I had a static web page for a couple of years that does well on search engines and now I just released the dynamic miva merchant store a couple of weeks ago. So I am waiting to see how the search engines are going to react to it. So far a few of my new pages have been picked up by the search engines.

Miva is a good solution, being able to buy additional mods for it will save you a lot of money. There are tons of mods to choose from take a look at www.mvcool.com to see what you can choose from (by the way mvcool is not the only resource). On that site look up search engine optimization modules and you will be returned with plenty. I use one that makes my links shorter and more static like. If I had my site on a dedicated server though (or atleast able to change stuff on my server) I would be able to get my links to look very static like.

I have not found anyone having trouble with miva and search engine indexing. If you are really worried about it, you can create your store with miva merchant and then by a mod that will generate you a static site. Which is nice for search engines but will become annoying if you plan to change your products a lot.

I use www.cubecart.com

It's crawlable and very easy to install...

Similar to installing vbulletin...