Two sites in same industry and which shopping cart

[catfree]

Right. So I suspect I am going to sound paranoid here - but you'll all forgive me right??

I am sure I saw a reply to a question on the Q&A suggesting that it was a bad idea to have two sites in one industry as Google may see it as trying to get two bites of the SERP cherry... is this accurate?

I have an existing asp.net site in the maternity wear industry here in Australia and am wanting to start another site to appeal to a different customer base... the market is quite broad. There will be a core list of products that are the same between the sites, but also some quite different products. Content, product descriptions and categorys will be different. I have another website that I bought with reasonable age and links in the industry that I was going to 301 to the new site to give it a kick in the juice.

So, not wanting to deceive my customers in anyway, I was thinking I would call it a "division of" or "sister site to" the existing ecommerce site, with a single link back and forward between the two sites. Would there be anything wrong with this in googles eyes? Even with same contact details? They would be run on totally different platforms and hosted by totally different providers. Or would you keep them totally seperate and only have contact details in images? Or a step further and have totally different phone numbers etc?

Then the shopping cart - I would love some suggestions on which opensourse cart to use, preferrably one that I can set up myself, and that has a good framework for seo. I want to use schema.org, authorship, seo friendly urls all of which I am having trouble getting out of the developer of my asp.net site.... I don't want the new site to be asp.net

Thanks in advance!!

[catfree]

Thanks David, that was my instinct - but I saw this post and freaked out a bit! And I love that terminology... more than one property in the same vertical - might make me sound like I half a clue what I'm talking about!

Sorry I didn't make it clear - I don't need the second site to be  asp.net... i have used osCommerce and osCmax before and found both quite easy..

[David_ODonnell]

I wouldn't be overly paranoid about Google knowing you own more than one property in the same vertical. You said the audiences are different, as long as the sites are unique (product descriptions are a big one) then you shouldn't have any issues.

Re shopping cart - I'm not familiar with asp.net sites so I can't help you there, sorry.