Ecommerce platform
-
Hello all,
My digital agency is starting to focus on building mainly bespoke ecommerce platforms. I've used a variety of open source platforms over the years, most of which I find un satisfying - specifically Magento (as the framework is very cumbersome).
I do appreciate that many SEOs love magento, especially with the shopping cart control - being able to track conversions and customer data handling onsite Etc.
My question is, what do ecommerce specialist SEOs and CROs want from a good ecommerce platform please?
Thanks
William
-
Thank you both for your responses - Lesley thanks for the lengthy reply.
Plenty of food for thought
-
Lesley nailed it!
I highly agree with the point that if you are looking for a customized (bug free) bespoken ecommerce platform you probably need dozens of developers and years of time to come up with the kind of ecommerce you ideally need.
There are tons of open source platforms available and almost every platform is missing one feature or the other. If you ask me the platforms I will prefer to my clients are:
- Open cart
- Megento
- Joomla
- Wordpress
And more…
Hope this helps!!
-
Let me address this on two levels, first being that unless your agency has hundreds of guys and is willing to develop a year into dev with them, you will have a hard time stacking up against the competition in so many aspects. Take Magento for instance, do you know how many years of security their are in it. How many bugs have been found, how many hours it took to get it to where it is.
Now for an answer to your question (I specialize in e-commerce and SEO related to) so I will give you the things that the platform I use does not have that I would like.
- The ability to easily set category paginated pages to rel=canonical the main category page
- The ability to easily set any page to a no-index
- The possibility for category pages to be able to use different descriptions per paginated page
- Backend editable robots.txt and htaccess
- Extreme analytics. Something like can be done with segment.io, where you can see a users real name, what page he landed on, what pages he looked at, whether he bailed out of the process and where he did. Sure you can do this with GA, but you cannot associate a name with them, or you violate TOS. I want to see that John Smith landed on my widget x page, then went to my sprocket page and came back to my widget page. Then he went through the checkout process and bailed out on the shipping step. I want people to be able to call John and ask him if there was a problem and know real information about him.
- Variables for everything. If I want to have a different title tag on an image than the alt tag, I would like some where to enter it.
- Good adwords integration, this can go great with the extreme analytics.
- This kind is covered by the other one, but really good stats, I want to see what products are popular in what countries, what products are popular, break it down by age if I require someone to enter an age on the account form, and sex too.
- Built in review engine that is a mix of trust pilot and yotpo. I want to automatically mail people for reviews, then I want to post the reviews to google automatically.
- Also easily export data for google trusted stores.
- Might as well have an export for google shopping as well.
- I would like to see it hook into Moz and Raven's api. How handy would it be to look in a back office product list and see a row of icons telling what needs to be adjusted SEO wise with a product. You can see at a glance which ones are duplicate or which ones have meta issues.
- Have a dashboard for Moz and Raven as well, where you can see mentions and things from the sites back office dashboard.
- A grade on demand button in the product page could be pretty awesome too, that used the Moz page grader.
- The ability to convert normal search pages into top level landing pages complete with the ability to change on page components.
This is what I can think of off my head for the moment. It seems every day I have new feature ideas.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should Our Mobile Responsive Version of our Ecommerce Site include the on Page content to Help with Rankings
Hello All, We are soon to launch our new redesigned website along with a mobile responsive version but i have noticed we currently don't include the on page Content we have on the mobile version which we have on the desktop version to help with rankings etc. I am not sure how google does mobile research with regards to rankings. We have designed our responsive version to be as user friendly as possible at the expense of having to much clutter/content but I am wondering now , if we will rank on mobile if all our on page content isn't present. Just wondered if we should include it at the bottom of the pages with say a "Read more" extension to help avoid clutter? Any advice greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
ECWID Ecommerce Sitemaps (Lack of)
Does anyone know if the lack of sitemaps on ECWID built sites is a negative for SEO? Does Google somehow index these sites and do they penalize because sites can't include the urls in sitemaps? Also, any idea how to build a sitemap to include ECWID shopping carts?
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Ecommerce Site - SEO
We have a Business Catalyst Site with the Same product Listed in 2 different catalogs. Each product page is the same page with different URLs you can see it here: http://www.yourpharmacy.co.nz/beauty/clarins-skincare/clarins-advanced-extra-firming-eye-contour-cream-20ml http://www.yourpharmacy.co.nz/clarins/clarins-advanced-extra-firming-eye-contour-cream-20ml Any suggestions welcome
Web Design | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Looking for a developer with Network Solutions platform experience
Looking for a developer with Network Solutions platform experience. 714-744-1926Tony Ashford
Web Design | | OCFurniture0 -
ECommerce and microdata
Last year I rolled my own online shop and I included schema.org microdata for all the products. My Google ranking continued to improve during that period, but I was doing a number of improvements, so I can't say how much was due to the microdata. My store continues to grow so I moved to an eCommerce solution. I opted to go with Volusion. Much to my surprise, about the only SEO feature they have implemented is SEO friendly URLs. They have not implemented microdata, which is pretty surprising given that all their sites are geared towards products. I would think it would be very easy for them to span the product name, description, price, etc, with a product schema. I called CoreCommerce, a Volusion competitor, and they have not implemented microdata either. Why are these large eCommerce providers ignoring microdata? Are there eCommerce solutions that have implemented microdata? Do large online retailers like Amazon and Buy use microdata? Is there any data that shows the SEO benefits of implementing microdata for an online store? Best,
Web Design | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
What is the best SEO friendly CMS platform?
Would like to build some content sites and would appreciate some guidance on what you believe to be the most SEO friendly CMS platform. I'm also hoping to find something that doesn't require much HTML and is pretty easy to jump into.
Web Design | | EdStaton0 -
Redesign of an ecommerce site
I was just wondering how we should deal with filters and pagination with our ecommerce website. We can do nofollow or noindex, follow or canonical for both filters and pagination. Which one we should choose and why? By the way we are trying to create more sub categories to avoid too many pages but we have 1,000s products and we still end up with a quite high amount of pages. I've read a few conflicting seomoz QA about this issue. Many Thanks
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
Ecommerce web site with too many internal links
Hi, We're using Magento CE 1.4.0.1 for our ecommerce web site with a fairly flat navigation system i.e. 9 major categories display across the top menu that when you roll over display 2-20 sub categories (which take you to a groups of similar products) and then individual product pages. The categories and sub categories are available to click on as part of a dynamic Html menu system on each page. Each page also shows a small number of related products. This linking structure seems fairly standard and yet Seomoz throws up the error message, "Too Many On-page links" for most pages on our site. Do I need to really worry about this? Is there much can be done to improve this on an ecommerce web site with a large catalogue of products? I've looked at the Knowledge Base but I don't feel the existing responses adequately address the issue for ecommerce sites.
Web Design | | languedoc0