Recommend Ecommerce solutions (Protx friendly)

[hellsbells]

Hi all,

I currently use Viart CMS & shopping cart for my website.

I'm looking to set up a website for my new business and whilst I like a lot of the functionality on Viart, using their 'custom web design/developing' is a long and painful process that I'm not keen to take on again.

So I'm looking for another CMS & shopping cart. My main requirements are:

• Easily integrated with Protx
• MUST be able to have SEO friendly URLs, without any hint of dynamic URLs.
• User friendly CMS so that I can make small changes myself

Obviously I'll also need the standard shopping cart functionality.

I took a look at the Protx recommended ones - including Actinic & ShopFactory (would prefer to avoid OSCommerce if possible)

Has anyone any recommendations? Would really appreciate your help.

H

 

[RedEvo]

It's not a standard approach but using a CMS such as Joomla/Drupal/etc with RomanCart can create a very flexible and VERY SEF solution. It's a non standard approach compared with X-Cart, OSC etc but creates a very user and SE friendly solution.

d

 

[Chris Ashdown]

I use Actinic and find it very robust easy to use and has a great helpful forum, entry level at about £20 per month or more all singing versions available

Download the 30 day free trial and have a play

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

joomla/virtuemart?

 

[awebapart.com]

would prefer to avoid OSCommerce if possible

That rules out our ecommerce solution, since we use osCommerce!

MUST be able to have SEO friendly URLs, without any hint of dynamic URLs.

It depends how far you want to take this requirement. How far a lot of solutions go in this area will still include category or product id numbers in the URLs (e.g. shop.com/girls-clothes-2 or shop.com/boys-clothes-3 or shop.com/3-boys-clothes ), so in that respect there is still a hint of dynamic/rewritten URLs in them, but this is a compromise a lot of shop owners live with.

Easily integrated with Protx

Since your existing site uses WorldPay I'm surprised you are asking about Protx. WorldPay allows you to have multiple websites on the same account, so you might be able to open a new website without the extra initial and ongoing cost of a new payment processor account.

There are 2 ecommerce suppliers on this forum who might be able to meet your requirements: www.openmindcommerce.co.uk (forum user name OpenMind) and www.internetretailer.biz (forum user name QuickShop)

 

[hellsbells]

Thanks everyone for your help so far. I've taken a look at some of them and I'll certainly download the actinic trial for a look-see.

The OScommerce negativity was because my supplier in the US had used them and found them to be inflexible... not sure of any more detail than that, but that's why I was avoiding them. I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise....

In terms of friendly URLs, I want to take it to the max...for example on my current website it says:

/polaroid_album.html
/digital_photo_guest_book.html

I'd like to be able to keep this level of friendly URL-ism!

My existing website does use Worldpay - but only until tomorrow when my Protx account goes live hopefully. To be honest I'm getting shtupped with fees at Worldpay and I'll just about halve them by moving to Lloyds TSB & Protx. I thought I'd best start as I mean to go on with my new site.

Thanks for all help to date - keep the recommendations coming!

 

[Dwebs-Ltd]

Have a look at CubeCart fully SEO basic WYSIWYG editor for adding pages to the shopping cart. You can alter the skin itself but you would need to know a bit of css and html. But you can make it look exactly how you want to.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

It sounds a bit late now but we used to use Cardnet and Protx but found that once you get a decent turnover Cardnet start really chargeing the world

We joined Fed of small business which gives you free joining to Streamline for your Merchant account where you get them for free, plus very cheap rates and still use Protx as the PSP

 

[hellsbells]

Oh Chris....don't tell me that!

I'll give it a go with Lloyds & Protx and see how it goes. Is it really cheeky of me to ask roughly what you're paying with streamline? Feel free to tell me to sod off!

I was paying about 3% on cc trans with Worldpay and 45p for debit cards amd I've roughly halved that, so at the mo I'm feeling quite happy with that... But I have a feeling you're going to spoil my happiness....

 

[Optegris]

Hi Helen,

Take a look at our eCommerce software as it integrates perfectly with Protx VSP form/direct, has a very solid SEO structure and the release coming out today also includes a full CMS (hence why the demo is offline at the moment)

Its an extremely cost effective solution too as the initial purchase includes your hosting and a free SSL certificate for the first year. We're constantly developing new features for the system and these are also included FOC for your first 12 months.

It's not based on existing technology, it's been built from the ground up by ourselves based on seven years development experience so we not only know the system backwards but it makes it very simple for us, and you, to take further.

Please do give me a call on 08456 445 789 if you have any questions

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Oh Chris....don't tell me that!

I'll give it a go with Lloyds & Protx and see how it goes. Is it really cheeky of me to ask roughly what you're paying with streamline? Feel free to tell me to sod off!

I was paying about 3% on cc trans with Worldpay and 45p for debit cards amd I've roughly halved that, so at the mo I'm feeling quite happy with that... But I have a feeling you're going to spoil my happiness....

Cardnet are OK to start with I think about £25 per month, but when the turnover gets to a ertain level they let rip and start charging hundreds, thats the time to move on

 

[bluecm]

It's not a standard approach but using a CMS such as Joomla/Drupal/etc with RomanCart can create a very flexible and VERY SEF solution. It's a non standard approach compared with X-Cart, OSC etc but creates a very user and SE friendly solution.

d

I'd rcommend using Joomla/Virtuemart with Artio JoomSEF (make sure you have the Artio Virtuemart module too). This combination will automatically generate SEF url's which you can manually maodify if needed.

Hope This Helps

Regards

Nathan

 

[quikshop]

There are 2 ecommerce suppliers on this forum who might be able to meet your requirements ... and www.internetretailer.biz (forum user name QuickShop)

Thanks for the recommendation Paul. We do use dynamic urls in our system but it doesn't make any difference to SERPS.

We've run an Actinic v5 shop which uploads static Html shop pages, an osCommerce shop which does some 'stuff' with PHP (you can explain that better ) and several custom built dynamically generated shops.

The only shop we failed to get to page 1 of Google was the osCommerce one but that was due to the highly competitive nature of 'designer clothing' and our lack of SEO knowledge at the time.

One of our dynamically generated shops got to 1st on page 1 of Google for a search on 'handbags' out of 90 million or so other websites (its not ours any more but its still there, just above Debenhams ).

We don't see any preference given to static pages, and more than a dozen of our shop keepers dynamically created shops now show on page 1 of Google.

 

[Shoptistic.com]

We use CSCart (www.cs-cart.com) and have been developing with it for years. It does everything you want and a LOT more...

 

[DuaneJackson]

There are 2 ecommerce suppliers on this forum who might be able to meet your requirements: www.openmindcommerce.co.uk (forum user name OpenMind) and www.internetretailer.biz (forum user name QuickShop)

I'd second the recommendation on both of those. They're both good products made by companies who really listen to what they're customers have to say.

 

[awebapart.com]

MUST be able to have SEO friendly URLs, without any hint of dynamic URLs.

We do use dynamic urls in our system but it doesn't make any difference to SERPS.

I agree that dynamic urls shouldn't make too much difference to search engine rankings on the major search engines. What might make a small difference is the amount of redundancy and dilution in a targeted url, the parts of the url that contain other things except the targeted keywords, and that can come in many different forms:

domain.com/targeted-keywords (no redundancy)
domain.com/c32-targeted-keywords
domain.com/targeted-keywords-c32
domain.com/targeted-keywords.shtml
domain.com/catalog/targeted-keywords
domain.com/websitebrandname-targeted-keywords
domain.com/targeted-keywords-bywebsitebrandname
domain.com/targeted-keywords-other-words
domain.com/category.php?category=targeted-keywords
domain.com/category.aspx?category=targeted-keywords
long-domain-name-with-no-relevant-keywords-in-it.com/targeted-keywords
etc

(it is a matter of debate whether some of the above examples do actually add dilution and redundancy or not, e.g. extensions like .html)

But if you've got your keywords in your url after the domain, that is good start, and the rest is just a question of squeezing out as much optimisation as possible.

So it is not the dynamic-ness of the URL which is the issue, it is the keyword dilution of the URL. Some systems might also generate static html versions of their catalogue in order to get around this 'issue', thinking that it really is an issue, but static html versions introduce their own problems, e.g. it is difficult to show dynamic real-time stock remaining numbers in a static page. Some ecommerce solutions generate static versions of their catalogues for other reasons, e.g. for better performance on cheap hosting since the database isn't being hit each time a page is loaded, I think some Actinic setups do it because they don't have an underlying database on the server.

Keywords in a url is just one factor out of the 200 or so factors that google use to rank pages, and in my opinion it is not up there at the top if you order these factors in order of importance and priority. Top factors are things like title tags, on-page content etc. This is one of the reasons why we haven't even implemented keywords in URLs yet within the ecommerce part (based on osCommerce) of our sitebuilder solution (although we have with the CMS part of our solution), but this is on our short-term to-do list, and hopefully when we add this our clients might see some slight improvement in rankings.

Hellsbells, by all means ask for keywords in urls as one of your requirements since they do provide some SEO benefit, but don't forget to include in your requirements all the other more important SEO factors too.

The other thing to consider, is that keywords in urls after the domain name, e.g. category pages and product detail pages, wont help much with the main keywords you are targeting for your site overall, i.e. the keywords where you want your home page to come up in the results. They only really start to kick in on the more specific long tail searches. So if you have say a fashion jewellery site, then your main sitewide keywords would be fashion jewellery which points to home pages (so SEO friendly URLs after the domain name with keywords on other pages don't matter so much here), but a more specific long tail search, e.g. Swarovski Crystal Bracelets will target pages within a site (so SEO friendly URLs after the domain name with keywords will contribute). The reason I use this is example is because one of quickshop's clients, bohofashionjewellery (another member of this forum) appears well in both types of searches, and that's with dynamic urls.

The only shop we failed to get to page 1 of Google was the osCommerce one but that was due to the highly competitive nature of 'designer clothing' and our lack of SEO knowledge at the time.

To the outsider, it seems like oscommerce is getting a bit of bad press on this thread, so I should say that it is possible to get SEO results if you customise osCommerce right. For example, we have one client, ellemoda, who appear 1st page of google for their main site-wide target, ladies designer shoes, and for more specific long tail searches, brand and product searches like pure handbags ('Pure' is a brand)- and that's without any keywords in the either the main domain name or the url part after the domain name.