It just won't

Things your Ecommerce system just won't do, no matter how hard you try

[vincevincevince]

A list of missing features in today's ecommerce systems - those things you wish you could do but you can't:

1) Allow the same product to be listed in more than one category without having duplicate 'SEO friendly' URLs
No matter what I try, carts which allow a product in more than one category insist on having both /category1/product.html and /category2/product.html URLs - duplicate content nightmare!

2) Support any kind of split testing with prices or shipping
I've found some which do split testing of design and even order-flow, but none which allow for completely different prices in the split-test.

3) Instantaneous data interchange with store/warehouse based PC in case of internet outage, also for locally printing labels and keeping backups.
Major gripe from me - as soon as the internet line or server is down, all pending orders are unavailable until the connection is up again. I'd love to have them sent to a local PC where they can be worked on quickly and reliably.

[stroudtx]

You need to get a cart that supports a dynamic backend driven from a database. Then you can set your own rules for it to use. Check out webassit. This is the cart we use.

Mike

[Essex_boy]

You make some good points there, however how many webstores are large enough to worry about the above?

Not many, if they are then I would imagine they could afford to have that kind of thing written for them.

[jsinger]

Do any have really good Google-like text product search forms?

[Oliver Henniges]

I always pursued the "do it yourself way". It gives you much more control over the whole thing. As for your #1) I have no Problems to list a product in more than one category.

Much more: I designed up to three category-levels, and grouped up to 20 products together on the final pages, with all these final pages being available and indexable as landing pages. e.g.:

mydomain.com/products/catlev1/catlev2/productgroup/productgroup.html

The final repetition dates back to days when keywords in url were a relevant seo-thing. The meta-tags are taken from the same database building the title and description tag out of the folder names, and compiling the keyword-meta-tag from the product descriptions. So if the final group-pages don't comprise exactly the same product-items I am absolutely sure there will be no duplicate content.

One disadvantage is, maybe, the fact that I did not add any credit-card-payment yet, because that would be fairly complicated to program myself, and I'd suspect the credit card copmanies require very high standards concerning security- and privacy-issues. However, those credit-card-fees amount to 3% of the order volume here in Germany, which is much more than our losses selling on commission, so I don't really miss anything.

> Instantaneous data interchange with store/warehouse based PC in case of internet outage

I am not sure whether I understand what you are aiming at. How do you want to perform any data-interchange once the server is down? As long as it is up, I personally might program any data-interchange I like; I was thinking of some sort of availability-check (with the internet-server checking our local warehouse-system via dyndns), but I am afraid the uplad-capacities of our DSL-con won't suffice.