Questions about OSCommerce

[budbiss]

My ecommerce site uses osCommerce, I had a friend of mine set it up and he also maintains it (I have other stuff going on, so I don't have time to mess with it or learn more PHP and such). He seems to be pretty competent, yet the site doesn't seem to spider well. Some products got onto froogle and certain keywords on google will show us, but we're not one of the top listings for any keyword. Also, our page rank fluctuates, but the highest i've seen it was at 2. I have put alot of time into writing metatags, getting good content, site map, links, and anything else i could thing of. Anyone know if there is an issue with oscommerce not being able to spider well? I am thinking about abondoning osCommerce all together and trying out yahoo store.

Also, I have run the site through sim spiders and for the most part it looks good...i saw one issue with the secure page and something about there not being any h1, h2, h3 tags...but other then that it looks ok to me.

If you guys have any suggestions, please let me know...thanks

[Birdman]

Turn cookies off in your browser and see if there is a session id on the links to your product pages. It will be a very long string of meaningless characters. If you have them it could be the cause.

[budbiss]

Yes, there is a session ID there. Is this bad?

[Birdman]

Yes, it is. There are some add-ons for oscommerce to get the pages spidered properly. Try looking on their support site.

[budbiss]

OK, thanks! I will definatley address this isssue.

BTW, how would a Yahoo Store or something like X-Cart or Miva compare to osCommerce? I'm not very satisified with alot of things on osCommerce, but maybe I just expect too much.

[Birdman]

Personally, I prefer to 'roll my own' shopping cart solutions because you get an app customized to your needs. Unfortunately, not everyone can do that so these cart systems are the next best thing. I cannot comment on the other carts you mentioned. Sorry, never used them.

[budbiss]

Thanks for the comment birdman. I assume by 'Roll my own' you mean you completely custom design your site from the ground up? If so, thats awesome and I applaud your ability and determination to do so. I would like to do that, but I don't have the spare time to at this point. You say you haven't heard of the solutions I mentioned, are there any that you are familiar with that you would recommend?

[Birdman]

I don't see anything wrong with the oscommerce solution, as long as you fix the spiderability and add custom titles and h tags.