Looking for SEO-friendly shopping cart

[wiltonbiz]

I didn't see any recent posts on this issue. I have an old ecommerce site that needs a new shopping cart solution. I must have customizable title tags for each product; and I'd love to have product urls that are seo friendly also. Finally, I have a blog on my current ecommerce site that is super important to the site. The url is www.bluewidgets.com/blog and it has to remain this way on the new shopping cart. I started having a new site built in a hosted shopping cart, but it turned out they could not host the blog in the way I needed. (It would have been www.bluewidgets.com/v/blog. Well, that's no good! With tons of links to my blog, I'm not going to 301 it.
Finally, this is not a big money site, so I can't spends zillions.
Any ideas welcome,
thanks,
WB:o

[AussieWebmaster]

unless the page names are the same as before you have to do 301 redirects or you lose the links etc.

[RedFly]

Take a look at Magneto:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

[Marcia]

For the URLs you'd have to use a mod_rewrite solution (using regular expressions) to handle the changes.

In very loose pseudo-code:

Condition (event): user agent requests the URL that's been indexed

Rewrite rule: define the pattern (regex) and pull up the new URL to serve to the user agent, feeding it a 301.

[wiltonbiz]

Thanks guys. I don't intend to rewrite all the product pages -- just the top level pages. What I really need is suggestions on some good carts that are SEO friendly.

Thanks,
WB

[AussieWebmaster]

oscommerce and xcart are good

[RedClown]

I would recommend Avactis - it's quite search engine friendly and is also quite easy to skin and setup.

[Jazajay]

I recommend you do it your self. I built my ajax shopping cart in under 5 hours.
The rest of my site has just had a whole upgrade in less then 1 1/2 weeks from scratch. That way you get good seo and is dead easy to change if you create your self a server side template.

[AussieWebmaster]

It would take me more than 2 weeks to brush up the programming skills

[Jazajay]

man an Ajax shopping cart is a straight forward form with added functionality. IE mine has this item has just gone out of stock if an item goes out of stock after they have added it to the cart. Also if they click add more remove one it happens automatically.

Next you have your home page,
category page,
sub category page,
product page,
support page and
thank you page.

And wella you have a site that can create millions of pages in an instance. All from 45 includes files making maintenance a dream hence my re-design. It is then basically all down to variables and loops. Mine has a lot of ajax brought in now,again one ajax call brought in from one JS sheet, and the category pages are quite complex granted but a basic site is not that hard. Also my sub-category page has 2 one list form with product description, for SE and one grid form which is brought in via a link, and block by SE's with no product descriptions, well unless you click the Ajax product description link.

6 hours a day for 1 1/2 weeks on my own job done simple. The best thing is that in the future my whole site will take a bout 5 mins to change, SEO changes can happen accross my whole site with the changing of 1 include file for title etc... and 5 files for on page.

I am not including my screen reader version or my mobile phone version which is next on the agenda in that time frame I would then agree with you and say it would take longer.

Bare in mind 60% of each page I only needed to create once and 15% of the code was copy and paste change variables/how they are brought in. Please i don't want to create work for my self.

Edit: O yeah I also forgot to add a CMS from scratch. Again 6 forms 1 days job. It has no styling but that requires the change of 3 include files to bring in. My asyemtrical algorithm I use on the log in form I didn't recreate though lol

[AussieWebmaster]

I have to grab a couple of learn in a week books

[Jazajay]

It would take me more than 2 weeks to brush up the programming skills

Seriously aussie you cant be that bad when did you learn the 70's? lol

[Jazajay]

I have to grab a couple of learn in a week books
the best book you can ever get when it comes to learning PHP granted it's not the be-all and end all is PHP and MYSQL for dummies the big yellow one. It even tells you how to set up an Apache server, PHP and a MYSQL database, as well as loop constructs, variables and how to build a basic e-commerce site.

No shopping cart though for that pick up 5 php applications you use every day again the dummy series you'll learn mailing systems, basic CMS, Intranet and a shopping cart recommended buys.

Then if you are serious about your php SEO
PHP with SEO or the other way around and mod_rewrite both from the programmer to programmer series and wella you will be wrtting code better than if you went to UNI. (or giving those uni boys and gals help when they get stuck :D)

[jewboy]

OSCommerce with a few good SEO plugins is my choice of shopping carts. If you are looking for commercialized package - there are so many SEO friendly shopping carts these days. Many of the vendors display at SES or other search industry conferences. A good resource to find shopping carts that keep seo in mind would be to look at the vendors lists, and sponsors.

[AussieWebmaster]

I like xcart a variation of oscommerce