Monster Commerce

Does anyone use it? Is it SEO friendly?

[gzlatin]

I'm currently a Yahoo store and I'm thinking of switching over to monster commerce. I really like their backend functionality and It seems like it's pretty easy to do custome designs. I have two concerns though:

1. Is it possible to re-write the dynamic URL's to be more search engine friendly?

2. I read on their message boards that people having problems with their shopping cart. i.e. people putting in their info, clicking submit and getting error pages, etc. This is bad. Very very bad and is an immediate deal breaker for me. Can anyone comment on this?

[jsinger]

Wasn't Monster Commerce just bought by Network Solutions, the people who broke all records for internet arrogance in the late 90s?

MY RULE: When your nice friendly cart or ISP is bought by a large company, especially a big publicly owned one, start shopping for a replacement...You have about a year to find one before everything goes to hell.

Of course, this could be a rare exception.

[KevinC]

I'm not sure if i follow your logic? Monster has been experiencing growing pains in the last year and with the recent buy out they have a huge influx of cash to take care of loose ends and hire on new staff. I think they mentioned something in the neighborhood of 80 new tech support(I may be wrong).

As for rewriting urls, no this is not possible but may be in the future. Overall I think it is one of the best solutions out there, although it does have some drawbacks, but I feel there are more pros then cons.

[minnapple]

My knowledge of Monster is a little dated.

But a couple of years ago they started the "Catalog Generator".

The "Catalog Generator" produces a set of "seo friendly" pages, separate from the "store" pages. These "Catalog" pages had flatten urls without dynamic strings.

At that time, there was a seperate change to have Catalog pages, and you were charged on a sliding scale by the frequency of regenerating these secondary pages.

I worked with a several store owners that opened monster sites in addition to their yahoo sites. They all dropped the monsterc sites after awhile.

However, these owners already had successful sites and they were just testing alternatives. Most of them they just didn't have the time to manage and promote a second site, and learning a new platform just erased any benefits monsterc offered.

The things that attracted ystore owner's to MonsterC was no rev share and the promise of a higher level of support.

The downside, was the paying for a patch for search engine rankings and the learning curve associated with the platform. The lengthy check out process was also a negative.

Once again, my knowledge is somewhat historic, so I welcome anyone with current info to chime in.

[Wlauzon]

You might check out Shopsite - I don't have any personal experience with it, but it seems like about the only ecommerce package that has gotten more favorable than bad reviews in the yahoo stores forums.

[gzlatin]

thanks minnapple, that was exactly the kind of information I was looking for. I guess MC has a lot of features and can be very powerful but when you get down to the nitty gritty, it has some major issues (as far as I'm concerned) like the long checkout process and the dynamic URL's. It seems to me that their solution for the url's is to offer a plug-in that creates a site map but that is not nearly a solution to the "SEO" problem. It's better to have pretty url's for 2 reasons...one being to tell the search engines what the page is about but more importantly because that url comes up in the search results and might affect if people will actually click on your listing.

I think I'm going to stick things out with Yahoo. By the way thanks for telling me about the Yahoo forums!

[Wlauzon]

By the way thanks for telling me about the Yahoo forums!...

The ystore forums are by far the best forums devoted exclusively to Yahoo stores around, it is the only one I post on. It is also where most of the yahoo site developers, RTML programmers etc hang out.