Adding Ecommerce to an Established site

What are the risks involved and .com v .co.uk?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I have a client who has three bricks and mortar shops sellling specialised products. He now wants to add an ecommerce solution to his existing web site. This site currently features well in all the engines and clearly we do not want to compromise this in any way.

We shall be using OSCommerce as the solution. Will the addition of many new pages to the site at the same time cause any problems?

The shop will target mainly the north American marketplace because the products are gaining popularity there. The current website is on a .co.uk domain and another option would be to create a separate website purely for the shop and based on a .com domain. The existing website could have a "Go shopping" link to the new site. Also, the new site would eventually provide additional traffic opportunities. Would this be effective?

Thoughts?

[tedster]

I did something like this for a client over the past two years. They had an informational website, well established and well-ranked over a 6-year period. We added ecommerce to the site in a new directory and had nothing but good results. PR went up (all those extra product pages can help!) and rankings for the entire domain only improved.

I can't address the .co.uk issue because this was a .com -- but if your client's current .co.uk site does well in the search engines for North America, I would say go for it. It's a lot easier than establishing a new domain these days.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Thanks for that Tedster but don't you think that there may be additional opportunities with the .com option? It woudn't really need to generate it's own traffic in the short term because it's traffic would be delivered to it by visitors to the other (informational) site who wanted to buy something. Perhaps in the long term (after sandbox) it would also develop additional traffic?

[tedster]

If you've got the time to invest, and if there's a significant inventory to be placed online, then yes -- using a new .com instead of putting it all on a .co.uk could offer advantages. If you go that route, I'd say go all the way: serve the domain in the US, on an IP block owned in the US.

[Lobo]

Adding e-commerce is not a problem .. that's what the web is all about ...

.com over .co.uk for sure, you could add a 301 on the.co.uk but this may effect your rankings initially.

But I'd suggest you bite the bullet and go for it ..

[ecomconsultant]

I suggest adding the E-commerce store through an additional domain name like mybizstore.com.

This way you will not risk effecting your rankings and can start from scratch to optimize the store with atleast one back link from your original site.

Sean

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

There are probably some complications. I had also thought about using a US hosting company but the product derives from the UK and everyone in North America knows this.

[sniffer]

I added ecommerce functionality on the back of an info site and Yahoo completely dropped our site from their index. 10 months later we are back in, but nowhere near as many referrals. There was no duplicate content but an unusual rate of pages added, which had hardly any content.

PS - Google didnt have a problem with it