Hello all,

I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on shopping carts and their searchability in different languages.  I realise html and static page carts such as Actinic seem to be the best in terms of search engine visibility, but they seem to be a bit pricey at £400GBP for the basic model cart only and integration costing up to £2500GBP. 

If I was to have a bespoke PHP cart, this would be significantly cheaper, but I was wondering if it's possible to change meta tags etc in the pages to make them more search engine friendly and how easy it is for the search engines to index the pages - page urls etc.  Also, I'm interested in the same info about ASP shopping carts.

Has anyone had any experience with optimisation of any of the above and could there be a cheaper/better option out there that I can host on my own servers?  Thoughts anyone?

Thanks.

You actually have quite a few options with the shopping cart.  I would recommend looking at a PHP cart.  Depending on the software program you should have no problem with the SEO parts.  You should look for the following qualities in your system:

1.  Make sure the page titles are based on the product and not the same from page to page, and
2.  It would be best if the URL's are rewritten.  In other words, if the shopping cart has url's like mydomain.com/index.php?mod=shop&id=304, then it will not be friendly.  You want to have mydomain.com/shop/304 or something similar.

I'm sure there are plenty of ASP carts out there as well, but I don't know what sort of support for URL rewriting they will have.

If I were you, I would start looking for shopping cart software here

Hello,

many thanks.  I've followed your advice and found a great looking solution - static html page generated, fully customisable option http://www.turnkeywebtools.com.  Their Sunshop seems to do the same as the other options I was presented with, but for about 25% of the cost.  This is great for me as I'm trying to do everything on a small budget. 

On another subject, and for anyone else interested in doing things on a small budget reasonably quickly or with limited skills, I've also found the site www.rentacoder.com to be a great resource for programmers and programming work completed at about 20% of the cost I could get it done for in the UK .  Place a bid and see who offers their services.

Thanks again!

Before you run off and spend your hard earned cash, ever thought of using PHP Nuke?

I run most of my sites using this cms, its mentally versatile. I also have shopping carts on some of them. I use Asers_Shop only customised for my needs.
My Nuke sites range from a Harry Potter fansite to a Cashback site .

I also run a phpnuke Help site

with nuke, code is free, help is free and thought is free. Theres also ways of changing URLs so they look better and perform in SE's better, again, free.

Worth a thought.
If you fancy a go at this, my advice would be to get the RAVEN bundle 7.6 from http://ravenphpscripts.com/
Its the most secure version there is (till I release mine)!

Thanks, I'll check that out too!  I'm thinking about a new site running a cms, so could be great.

Although I always rather build my own shopping carts, some of the sites I build for people just don't have the $ and it's not worth my time.  For small websites and people looking to bring their hobby to the web, this free shopping cart is a favorite of mine.  http://www.mals-e.com/

It's not going to give you all of the bells and whistles, but is great when you're working on a tiny budget and don't want to spend too much of your own time on the project.  It just has to be a "family friendly" site in order to be free.