Ecommerce Starter Kit Needed

Need recommendations please

[is300]

I'm starting my first ecommerce site and need recommendations on a template software package.

I know html design and seo really well- but am a rookie at ecommerce site development.

These are my needs:

1. I need an extremely intelligent search feature that can recognize products based on multiple attributes.

2. If a user selects a specific product, I'd like an area of the page to say "Users that bought this product also bought" and then list out other products. This would be identical to how amazon works.

3. Obvisiously I would need a user-friendly backend admin panel that could control all sites aspects.

4. Finally, since search engines have a hard time reading dynamic content, are there any starter kits that will generate static html pages for individual products? Is it even possible to have a static ecommerce site that is somewhat easy to update?

I'll probably be adding new products every week.

Thanks

[Corey Bryant]

Since advertising your own products is not available here, the thread might not be there when you finally are able to review it.

Are you wanting ASP or PHP? If you want PHP - check out, oscommerce and the advertising was removed

-Corey

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 6:01 am (utc) on May 9, 2004]
[edit reason] URL removed [/edit]

[is300]

Thanks, i saw oscommerce. I like the idea that's it free open source. Will the php issue be a problem though? I'm really want to keep my pages static, but still want to be able to update prices and products quickly.

[Corey Bryant]

Not too sure what you mean by static?

-Corey

[Marcia]

Static looking - no long shopping cart URLs with a load of parameters and session id's.

Google can index dynamic URLs but not so Yahoo. I believe Americart has static options and there are hacks for osCommerce, which is open source.

Most would probably recommend a custom developed cart, or custom modification, like if you'll want inventory and other special features.

[Corey Bryant]

Well both PHP & asp URLs can be re-written actually. That might be what you need.

-Corey

[Marcia]

is300, before you even think of choosing a package you might want to sit back and take a good read of our Apache Web Server forum

[webmasterworld.com...]

For IIS and .asp there's ISAPI rewrite, but for the majority of Ecommerce packages and hosting/servers out there you'll want to read up all you can on mod_rewrite and search engine friendly URLs.

Planning ahead armed with knowledge is an economy in the long run, rather than have to make modifications later on.

[is300]

Thanks Marcia,

That looks like a lot of reading in the forum. Are there any threads I should start with that would be good for a beginer? i'm looking at searchfit.com right now for a static ecommerce solution.

[derekwong28]

xcart or litecommerce would fit all your requirements, including the static html catalog