Forum Moderators: buckworks
I want to open several ecommerce stores, each catering to different products/markets.
To keep things simple & keep overhead down for credit card processing, etc., I would like to set it them up in a Miva mall (I currently use Miva Merchant).
Each site would have it's own domain with several html pages, but all products would be in databases under the mall domain.
examples:
mall url:
www.malldomain.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv
store A product url:
www.malldomain.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=storeA&Category_Code=product
etc.
Will the search engines (primarily Google) have a problem with this? Would they see it as multiple domains pointing
to one store & would it hurt the rankings of the stores?
Are there other issues/problems I haven't thought of?
Anyone doing this successfully?
Any info would be greatly appreciated!
And remember to state on the web page invoice after checkout and the customer email that "company name" will appear on their banking statements. This is more important when using two URLs.
Kevin
Good points. I plan to place the mall icon on all pages of the individual stores & of course on the invoices to avoid chargebacks.
I appreciate the feedback!
-Anna
Will the search engines (primarily Google) have a problem with this? Would they see it as multiple domains pointing
to one store & would it hurt the rankings of the stores?
DMOZ might. Depending upon the category and the editor, it could be that they are all counted as affiliates of one of them.
As for SEK, those are not very pretty pages. Version 2 is a little better, but most of us dread surfers ending up there. Yes, I use it but I'm telling myself it's OK because they will immediately be lured to the shopping cart, and I wouldn't have got the customer anyway without SEK. But I certainly wouldn't make SEK pages the body of my site. The pages would have to be doctored significantly, and that defeats the whole purpose of SEK in the first place as a time saver. Although the pages created by SEK are perfect from a SEO standpoint.
Maybe you might consider for the less important domain/product line something like the following: It's own domain with static pages. Link to checkout and add basket goes to one of those third party card processors where you don't really have your own merchant account. Your checkout domain would be something like yourdomain.cardprocessorssite.com.
Recently I actually considered the multiple domains, one mall thing with Miva. In the end didn't do it because it's just not professional enough and causes some problems with SEO (and directories).
Kevin
[edited by: TallTroll at 11:16 am (utc) on June 9, 2003]
[edit reason] splice [/edit]
When the site starts making buku bucks get another separate miva domain license, a unique SSL certificate, merchant account, etc.
Kevin
although consider this post of mine about using the 3rd party guys for accepting credit cards...
[webmasterworld.com...]
Kevin
Search engines such as google will most certainly have a problem spidering your category and product urls in a miva merchant mall. Don't know why someone would think otherwise.
