Forum Moderators: buckworks
You might view the functions of Monster Commerce or www.linkpointcart.com to see if they fit everything. Another one, www.mals-e.com might help you out as well.
-Corey
Other carts you can consider are e-commerce templates, clickcartpro, squirrelcart and candypress but they are not as search engine friendly.
OS Commerce is probably too complicated for a non-programmer to use. You can look at its clones such as cubecart and zen cart which are easier to use.
?Derek as I'm not familar with a lot of the products out the like Mals. But you stated that ecommerce templates weren't search engine friendly. What are some of the points to look for when looking for a search engine friendly design.
Clay used it for 10Quicksteps, but I couldn't find his contact info there. Don't need to buy there, but see if x-cart has the workflow. I should probably track him down.
Almost all shopping carts on the market use dyanimically generated pages which may or may not be indexed well by search engines. Even when they are indexed, they may not be ranked as high as static html pages. Therefore you will find that most of the leading web-based solutions generate a mirror html catalog to complement their dynamic pages, just like litecommerce and x-cart. There is a third party module available for Miva merchant, and I have seen sites using OScommerce with mirror html pages.
There are other factors that affect ranking e.g. keywords inserted the title metatags of your site i.e. the title that appears on your browser window, and urls with keywords inserted into them. Both of these features are often missing from dynamically generated pages. It is not to say that dyanmically generated pages cannot be ranked highly, it is just that if you have a html mirror of the pages, the chances would be much better. Afterall, you are doubling the number of pages that can be indexed.
To evaluate how search engine friendly a particularly is, I would installed the google toolbar on your browser. I would then look at the examples of live shops listed. What I would be particularly interested is how much PR is filtered down to the inner product pages. For example if the index page of the domain has a PR rank of 5, I would expect the inner pages to have a PR rank of 3 or 4. Quite often I see a ranking of 0 or 1. Another way to check is to find some specific keywords on the particularly inner page and do a search on Google and see how high it is on the SERPS.
If you have only a limited no. of products to sell and whose specifications and prices do not change often, then Mal's would be great. You can build your own highly optimized html pages and use Mal's.
Derek
Tim
other items pertaining to oscommerce.
Up load with csv - use froogle contribution
enable/Disable shopping cart - not sure what you want here. You can turn on a statement saying "maintainance going on come back later".
many web templets - You will need to integrate and customize them in any shopping cart solution.
All items below depend on your ability, see this forum.
easy to use,no need programing skills,
have ability to submit with search engine, or searching friendly
I just went through a similar exercise, looking for a free or budget friendly cart system. I tried several, and learned quite a bit in the process. First, you will really need to evaluate what you need from a cart system. The requirements you listed are a good start, but only scratch the surface. How will you handle payments? Will you need to export data to an offline accounting system, such as QuickBooks? How will you need to present your products? What about shipping options, promotions, etc...
In my search, I thought I'd found the perfect match in OSCommerce. But, when I dug a little deaper into my requirements, I found a fatal flaw. I'm setting up an online store for my sister-in-law so she can sell children's clothing online. Turns out, OSC won't allow for inventory tracking by attribute (for example, black t-shirt with 12 XL, 7 medium and 9 large in stock). For my needs, that was a show stopper. I was also a bit concerned that a lot of key functionality I'd need from OSC was only available from 3rd party add-ons that may or may not stay in synch with subsequent revisions to the core system. Also, certain 3rd party add-ons seemed to conflict with others. None the less, the time I spent with OSC was quite valuable, in that it helped me focus in on all the detailed requirements. And, despite the fact that OSC wasn't a fit for my needs, I was very impressed with it.
I also took a look at CubeCart, X-Cart and LiteCommerce. We eventually settled on LiteCommerce. The core LiteCommerce system and the add-ons we needed wound up costing us about $200, but it was money well spent. X-cart (made by the same people who make LiteCommerce) costs about that much, and is also a very impressive product, though so far, I think the template system used by LiteCommerce is easier to work with.
In any event, I'd recomend downloading and installing OSC and CubeCart (maybe some others...) and spend some time "experimenting" with each. Either may turn out to be a perfect fit for your needs, and if not, you'll have learned a great deal about your needs from the process. Also, both X-Cart and LiteCommerce have online demos (of both the store front and admin section). Spend some time with those as well. I realize that these two commercial tools are outside your budget, but the extra money may well be worth it if you can get your store online in less time, with less effort.
When I spoke with Clay (see earlier post) he mentioned that X-cart wasn't as easy as the demo looked, but his implementation on 10quicksteps.com did turn out nice. I don't think the audience will find too many things useful there, but he does have a nice x-cart implementation. You can choose items, add them to the cart, then choose the payment system.
Thanks
