The Best Shopping Cart

Trying to find a NEW shopping cart solution for our site that is........

[Propools]

Trying to find a NEW shopping cart solution for our site that is:

• SE friendly
• Easy to use for a non-programmer (like myself)
• And did I mention SE friendly?

We've used SoftCart in the past and I hand coded every page. Not too difficult, so I would like to use something that's along the same lines. The reason why we're changing is because it is NOT SE friendly. Unless I'm just missing something. ;)

[8foldpath]

Traditionally, SE friendly is just how the URL is presented.. Do you have parameters in your URL's? If you like your current cart, there's definately a way to make it "SE" friendly. There's lots a server side software out there by companies like HeliconTech to help you with things like this.

[Propools]

We do not do the backend stuff in house. Our outsourced programmer says there's no way to server side SoftCart and keep the session id, etc. We get these long tail URL's like:

http://www.x_y_z_widgets.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.exe/product.php/30-198/index.html?L+scstore+mvsc2026fff4a0f4+1207263414

Which I truly want to get rid of due to the /cig-local/ which just loses the spider right? I know for certain that it won't cache the site pages which have that.

[Receptional Andy]

cgi-local is most likely less of a problem than mvsc2026fff4a0f4+1207263414 which looks a lot like a session identifier to me.

[Propools]

Yes, it is which also just really chaps my shorts. I don't recall us having this issue until we went switched our site from static to dyynamic.

Additionally, I've been poking around the error.log files for the site and every second of every day I've got the following message in said file:

[Wed Nov 14 23:58:12 2007] [notice] cannot use a full URL in a 401 ErrorDocument directive --- ignoring!

This has been going on since October 11th of last year. What's up w/ that? :o

[Propools]

The .htaccess file has the 401's going to our domain of http://www.x_y_z_widgets.com. I don't understand.
;) If there was an emoticon for 'banging my head against the wall' I would use it.

[edited by: lorax at 11:16 pm (utc) on April 2, 2008]
[edit reason] delinked example [/edit]

[Receptional Andy]

401s need to be a relative URL, so if you want the homepage use:

ErrorDocument 401 /

This is not really an error though (hence being marked as a 'notice'). It's just telling you to fix your errordocument.

[aleksl]

Propools, it all very much depends on what you are trying to do.

Shopping cart software typically is either very specific, or too generic. 99.9% of the time it isn't usable out of the box, no matter what developers preach. You will end up doing custom coding no matter what, unless you are in a very specific niche that has custom-tailored software developed, and even then you want to be different than other Joe, right?

So the right answer to your question is "it doesn't exist". Get one that you can live with, and hire someone to modify it to your taste.

[Propools]

aleksl, Thanks.

[CarolSLC]

I switched from SoftCart to ShopSite a couple of months ago for primarily this reason. I did custom templates in SoftCart, and did new custom templates in ShopSite. I thought it was well-documented how to do this, and pretty easy. And I ended up with product page url's that are whatever I want them to be - and very search engine friendly. I had shopsite installed in my web root, so for instance instead of the softcart url you have above, you could have http://www.x_y_z_widgets.com/yellow-tire-widget.html
for your url. Or whatever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be the sku.

If/when you do convert, make sure you put 301 redirects in your .htaccess file from the old softcart url to the new url for each page. I didn't at first, and our pages dropped significantly in google for a while, but we're now doing better than we were with softcart.

I can code html and a little javascript but do not consider myself a programmer, and I could do it.

[edited by: lorax at 1:25 pm (utc) on May 27, 2008]

[Aaron Kocourek]

Take a look at GoECart their ecommerce solutions was designed to be entirely search engine friendly.

"GoECart shopping cart software has been designed from the ground up so pages in your ecommerce site will achieve optimum visibility in the major search engines. While other Ecommerce solutions are penalized for using dynamic URLs, all GoECart web pages are friendly to search engine spiders and crawlers."

Hope this helps.

[edited by: lorax at 1:28 am (utc) on July 6, 2008]
[edit reason] edited for Minor Fair Use [/edit]