E-Commerce Solutions...

What can you recommend?

[jady]

Hi All,

We have been using eDatCat for a while, it is pretty flexable but extremely difficult to install and get online. We are looking for a new solution that is customizable and supports 3 or more layers of categories. Also require it to run off Linux enviornment.

Also - does anyone know a solution that is indexable by search engines such as Google?

Any advise is much appreciated!

Best Regards,

JADY

[jeremy goodrich]

We try to stay away from recommending specific products...in addition, we'd need a list of features you need to really help :)

Best advice would be to search through some of the script archives etc, for the platform you are looking to host on, make sure it supports the scripting language used to put it together.

Then do a search on the product you a looking at in a major engine, like Google, to see if other people have had anything ( good or bad ) to say about said product. :)

Hm, indexable too? You can use mod_rewrite in apache, or one of a few solutions in IIS to overcome the dynamic url issue.

Hope that helps! If anybody has any specific tips, perhaps they could stickymail you?

[gleeloyd]

I've used ShoppingQ (the full version, $225/site) for three different sites and like it. It runs on Linux. Very easy to set up and administer. My clients love it because it never causes problems and the admin interface is very simple. I Also have some experience with Kurant Storesense (more flexible, more expensive and more difficult to set up). I think ShoppingQ would meet your needs for the product hierarchy. It supports department-category-subcategory. You would have to see if it meets your needs appearance-wise. I think it comes with 40 predefined skins and you can make your own skins (I never have). Plus in many, many places you can drop in whatever html you can dream up. The ONLY thing I really wish Bitwise (the company that writes ShoppingQ) would put in is a way to access the shipping company services for real-time shipping calcs. I'll be glad to try and answer specific questions if you have any.

Gary

[Crazy_Fool]

i believe actinic catalog is fully spiderable / indexable by search engines as it uses .html files

[zipzip]

actinic uses an access mdb database on the local machine, but can run on a linux web server (read that on the box :o). its good for spiders though, cos it does make .html files

[ukgimp]

I can vouch for actinic

All the product pages have unique titles and the one a relative set up gets lots of internal hits for specific products. You need to check with your host if you have cgi access to run yor own scripts.

You dont have to have access runnuing locally though, not from what I have seen