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Switching Carts, Dealing with new product URLS.

Switching Carts, Dealing with new product URLS...

         

vacorama

4:36 pm on Mar 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I was wondering if anyone has any experience in switching shopping carts on a successful site..? I'm concerned that the move will hurt business for a while, how long and whether it's worth it is what i'm not so sure about. I'm currently running Miva Merchant and would like to switch over to a new cart program that i made, as well as a new (more SEO freindly) design.. Off the bat the benefits would be:
1: More flexibility (which i'm most happy about)
2: New CSS/standards driven design (good for SEO)
3: Static xhtml product pages with static URLS..
4: Smaller file sizes
5: Unlimited category delegation with automatic sorting by manufacturer
6: The ability to automate more daily tasks.
7: Quicker response time on server..

But the problem is the move is pretty drastic, and will most likely hurt business for a while.. I'm currently getting around 1000 visitors a day with a moderately expensive product line, and business has been as good as it's ever been. Changing the cart would change most of my product URLS... I know many hard core Miva users will say that the functionality im looking for is available through plug-ins but my biggest concern having the flexibility that would come from dealing with my own code. The two things i'm most concerned with are:

1: How do i handle products at the old URLS, which would still get a lot of traffic and still need purchasing ability.
2: Avoiding a duplicate content penalty for having old and new content side by side.

Handling these things by hand is not really an option because i have too many products. If anyone has any insight or similar experience, i would love to hear about it, as i'm pretty nervous about this whole thing and how it will effect the sites income.

Corey Bryant

6:24 pm on Mar 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



You can consider using mod-rewrite or ISAPI re-write depdending on the platform you are on

-Corey

vacorama

6:52 pm on Mar 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



i was thinking that might be a good option, but have never used. Are you suggesting that i have the old URLs redirect to the new ones?