Shopping Cart & SEO

[Chad Myers]

I am looking for referrals on a new shopping cart for my wife's fashion jewelry website ( www.panachechic.com ). The site is currently using php and mysql so I am targeting a compatible shopping cart. Some of the considerations I have are:

Search Engine friendly URLs
Grouping Hierarchy
Customizable Title Tags
Customizable Meta Tags

Please let me know there are any other considerations or if you have a specific cart you suggest.
Thanks!

[Ken Zweigel]

Chad,

The problem of finding a search engine-friendly shopping cart has been around for quite some time. I have been working on solvng this problem for several years and have developed a shopping cart combined with a content management system that was developed from the ground up strictly to benefit from SEO.

Here is an example of a site that uses this shopping cart: Miniature Guitars by Axe Heaven

This site has not only received excellent organic rankings and traffic from Google, but, as a result of our branding and marketing strategies, in only five months it has attracted several rock stars who now have exclusive merchandising agreements with the site owners, who started this as a hobby site. They just moved from Indy to California to be closer to the action of the rock and roll world becaiuse of all of the activity from the site.

Our optimized shopping cart has the features you seek and much more that can truly help your rankings efforts and your sales results. All other shopping carts on the market that I know of that claim to be search engine-friendly solve the problems of database-driven sites with workarounds and URL re-writes, where we actually deliver the static product pages the search engines prefer, which you can see by viewing any products on the Axe Heaven website.

I would be delighted to show you all of the features and benefits of our cart if you are interested in learning more. Please feel free to contact me at your convenience.

Ken at DRIVE, the engine to drive your business
317-966-0998

[Vincent Francesi]

Hi Chad!

Here is a shopping cart that looks like it has real potential: http://www.magentocommerce.com/

I have not installed it myself yet but it looks very user friendly. I have done a considerable amount of development in OScommerce adding many of the features that Magento comes with.

If you give it a try let me know I'd love to hear some opinions of other people using it!

Vince Francesi
Illumini, LLC

[Angela Halloran]

Hi Chad,

We offer a shopping cart that we have been using ourselves for years. Its a great cart that is easy to use giving you your own admin panel so that you can easily manage the site yourself and is fully customizable on the design end so we can make the store look anyway you would like, even using your current design:

As for SEO here are a few of our key features:
Search engine friendly product pages and links including the ability to generate static HTML pages
All pages can be easily indexed for all major search engines and crawlers
Set your own meta-tags for every product and other pages throughout the cart

If you would like to see a full list of our features you can visit our site here: http://www.creativejuicestudio.com/sunshop.html

If you would like to chat more, please let me know.

Thanks,
Angela

[Matt Zentz]

Chad, Adam didn't tell you about the e-commerce module that we're adding to Marketpath CMS? I'll have him get in touch with you to talk about it. Since we plan on engaging in some business soon, perhaps we could discuss a barter of some sort.

[Chris Tomlinson]

I'm not 100% up on my ecommerce stuff, but my developer is and she's using the magento software that Vincent mentioned. Thus far we are very very pleased with how it works and the integration.

~Chris
www.gonink.com

[Chad Myers]

Thanks Chris,

The Magento system did look nice, but we actually choose to go with the osCommerce cart. This decision was primarily made based on the amount of community contributions. The site is launching tomorrow - be sure to check it out and let me know if there are any additional contributions you suggest we should add.

www.BabyAndMeGifts.com

Thanks again for all the feedback!

Chad Myers
Three Hats Marketing
www.3HatsMarketing.com

[Chris Tomlinson]

Chad,

Hey, no problem. Trust me, we didn't even know about Magento and just stumbled upon it, so this is a bit of a dry run for us, but thus far we couldn't be happier. I think the credit card processing and shipping courier companies are causing us more headaches than anything at this point.

Chris
www.gonink.com

[Derrick Kinsey]

ViArt Shop and X-Cart are two excellent and cheap open source shopping carts. They both are PHP using the SMARTY template engine driven by MySQL. Actually ViArt can be used with any ODBC database. I actually prefer ViArt. They both are very SEO friendly with customizable titles, meta tags, and SEO friendly links.

If you're really looking to save money, Magento is a decent PHP cart that is free. Zen Cart is another open source PHP cart that can be downloaded and used free of charge. My personal opinion is that Magento is better than Zen but you can't beat the price for either!

DigiSHOP is another decent cart but it's a bit more expensive and you really don't gain any additional features but it probably does have the easiest back-end that I've ever seen. Very easy to use for even the non programmer.

The thing about X-Cart to watch out for is the site speed. X-Cart is very database intensive and will run a bit slower than some other carts. If you work with a lot of products and deal with customers who typically work with large carts, X-Cart will be slow. I run a dedicated server through RackSpace and the site that I have with X-Cart still runs slower than I would like even on an optimized dedicated server.

[Kevin Hood]

My experience is that Magento requires a more robust host than ZenCart, but it has a lot more features to offer as well. Plus the Magento template system and overall look / layout of both the front end and back end is better than ZenCart and other free solutions. The built in SEO is some of the best I've seen in the past several years, for a free or paid shopping cart.

[Jack Koning]

Hey Chad, remember UNext?! I was just cruising the site and discovered your question. I wish I had an answer for you, but I am just learning about shopping cart stuff myself. Your wife's site looks pretty good!

got to go!
Jack

[Chad Myers]

Hi Jack! Good to hear from you. please send me an email to let me know what you are up to...

[Joh Padgett]

Wordpress has a really nice easy to use shopping cart plugin that integrates with PayPal for processing through their gateway. You cant get more SEO friendly than Wordpress and the shopping cart works really well. I tested it for a client who ended up going with a different solution but was very impressed with the plugin. I still intend to use it first chance I have to for a client.