Add to cart from static page?

[desimo]

I was wondering if anyone could offer any help on selecting and/or modifying a shopping cart. My current comersus cart causes problems with the search engines, because I don't know how to change the titles or addresses of my product pages, those pages I'd like most to show in the SE's.

I think I've seen a few sites with an "add to cart" option directly from an html page, which seems to make sense, but then why don't I see it more often?

I'm inclined to think that comersus just isn't going to allow enough flexibility to do what I want as far as SEO is concerned, and would be willing to scrap the whole cart and start over.

Any resources would be appreciated, especially the most basic. Is there an ecommerce bible?

-desimo

[Essex_boy]

Not that im aware of, you might wish to take a look at webgenie it can do all you ask.

[mt_biker]

Ecommerce and SEO can work together, but it can be labor intensive. Whether you want to take on this task often depends on how many products you are offering.

The reason you don't often see an "add to cart" option directly from an HTML page is because most ecommerce sites have lots of products for sale and are dynamically driven by their product database. Creating static HTML pages for each product is very labor intensive and therefore expensive. Though I totally agree that this is an effective strategy from a SEO standpoint.

Fortunately, it is not too hard to find a compromise. If I'm building a site with lots of products, I like to build static HTML pages for the major categories (mostly for the search engines, but also for visitors) which lead to the dynamically generated pages. Properly done, though, even dynamically generated pages can be spidered by Google, though probably not at the same rate as your static pages.

This is not as easy as going for a totally database driven site, but seems to work well for those on a budget. I know there high-end solutions that generate static HTML from a database (thereby solving the problem) but they are financially beyond my clients.

I never heard of Web Genie but I'm going to take a look.

Also, any decent shopping cart software should allow you to change your page titles, IMO.

[kjs50]

I personally have all my products in a database (Access) and have written php scripts (using smarty templates) to generate static pages for each item. I highly prefer this method because of the benefit of static pages for search engines, increased performance from not having to hit a database for each page, and I can highly modify how my pages are generated with extremely customizable fields for everything.

I wish I could find a nice CMS that could help me maintain my data but I have to edit directly in my Access tables.

[mt_biker]

kjs50,
Any tips/resourses you can point to help someone start to learn how to do what you have done (php scripts & smarty templates)? I conceptually understand what you are saying, but have no idea how to go about creating the scripts.

[kjs50]

I'd be glad to help out. You just first need to set up php on your own computer (I use a combination php/mysql package called easyphp), or it is most likely running on a host if you have it. Then you can install the smarty templates and set up a test script. You can use any database you would like, Access, MySQL, whatever is easiest for you.

Let me know once you have that and then you need to just make a different php call for the smarty templates to write to a file when you go through your database.

[cbarling]

Try looking at [actinicdownloads.com...]

This explains how Actinic does exactly what you asked for, but the same techniques can apply to any ecommerce store.

(Declaration of interest: I work for Actinic).

Chris