Need advice re: selecting an Ecommerce platform
-
Hi. I am responsible for choosing an ecommerce platform and overseeing the implementation of a large ecommerce site. The site will have tens of thousands of products and will be fairly complex.
Eventually the site will integrate with the suppliers back end inventory/order management system, which is some sort of custom Windows/.NET system. (I'm not very technical if you haven't noticed....)
Primarily I want a platform that is SEO friendly, and I have to be sure that the site is developed properly from an SEO and usability perspective. I thought I would go with an asp.net solution (aspdotnetstorefront, specifically) to facilitate the future integration, but I am questioning this choice after reading some of the comments I have found here at SEOMoz.
So is asp.net really a bad choice SEO-wise? I almost considered Magento, but was having trouble finding a good solution provider to work with. I also worried about integration issues down the road.
I would appreciate any advice or input anyone may have.
Thank you!
-
Thank you Keri, I had read about speed issues with Magento before, but I thought they had been mostly resolved.
I think I am going to stick to my asp.net solution..... it's a decision, anyway.
-
- 75,000$?
-
Tyler,
Thank you- I didn't even notice that the providers were classified as Enterprise etc. I started at the top and was immediately priced out of the market!
-
You might look at this question regarding ecommerce. http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-the-most-seo-friendly-ecommerce-cms-platform-available-today
In the answers, there is someone using Magento with 60,000 products between two sites. Speed has been a large problem, though it looks like a recent update has helped. You might contact that poster, as it looks like s/he could offer a lot of first-hand experience.
-
I don't know if you looked here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/partners/find/solution-partners/united-states/
But this is the route I used to find my service provider. I would go to the last page and start there with professional providers not enterprise. They will work on the free community version without too much trouble.
The biggest question when talking to these people is "what kind of companies do you normally work with" - if it sounds similar to your situation that's good!
If I answered your question please mark "this answered my question"
Thanks
-
Thank you for your response. If you know of any good Magento solution providers, and wouldn't mind sharing that would be very helpful.
Stephanie
-
Hello,
You have identified my two favorite ecommerce platforms. I opted for magento and am very pleased with the site, usability and seo. I think you will find asp.net a good choice too. Either way you will need to find a good provider. The provider list at magento is long and there are some good ones in there. Mostly asking around 4,000$ and up to work with them. Both Magento and Asp.net as excellent choices and will fit any store owners needs. Don't worry about integration down the road. Unless there are some technical things you need done.
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
-
Menu Structure for Large Ecommerce
Hi We have a large ecommerce site, the menu at the moment is limited by the amount of categories we can display. As our site is so large, the menu at the moment only has the top categories and their immediate subcategories, however we have level 3's which go deeper, as there is such a large range. At the moment, they;re not in the top menu, but I want to put a case forward to say why we should include them - I am however mindful of a menu not being overcrowded with hundreds of links. Has anyone had a similar experience of this? Or a case study on how adding important categories to the menu helped improve things? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Monthly Refreshes Aren't Actually Needed, Right?
We get tons of emails from Network Solutions with the following text: To ensure that your website is easily found online it is important that you submit your website to the major search engines and internet directories, including: | Google™ Google Places™ Google Mobile™ Bing™ Yahoo!<sup>®</sup> Twitter<sup>®</sup> | Facebook<sup>®</sup> CitySearch<sup>®</sup> Foursquare™ Angie's List<sup>®</sup> GPS navigation MerchantCircle<sup>®</sup> | To do so, we recommend you go to each search engine and internet directories web page, locate the instructions and then complete a monthly refresh of your listing. If you would like us to complete this process for you please call us at... Everything I've ever read about modern SEO says this isn't necessary and it's just a solicitation to get people to pay them for something they don't even need. We update our social pages regularly and maintain listings on many citation sites using Moz Local (in addition to manually building citations). Can you guys confirm that this is just more spam from Network Solutions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottImageWorks0 -
SEO Question re: Keyword Cannibalization
I know about Keyword Cannibalization, so I understand why it's generally a problem. If you have multiple versions of the same page, Google has to "guess" which one to display (as I understand it, unless you have a SUPER influential page you won't get both pages showing up on the SERP). To explain why I'm not sure if this applies to our page, we have a blog that we write about employment law issues on. So we might have 20 blog posts over the past year that all talk about recent pregnancy discrimination lawsuits employers might be interested in. Now, searching the Google Keyword tools, there aren't even close to 20 different focus keywords that would make any sense. "Pregnancy Discrimination lawsuit" is niche enough for us to be competitive, but anything more specific than that simply has very little search activity. My suggestion is to just optimize all of them for "pregnancy discrimination lawsuit". My understand of how Panda works is that if the content is different on each page (and it is!) then it will only display what it guesses is the most relevant "NLRB" post, but any link juice sent to the other 19 "NLRB" posts would still boost the relevancy for whatever post Google chooses. And it wouldn't get dinged as keyword stuffing because it's clearly not just the same page repeated over and over. I've found quite a few articles on Keyword Cannibalization but many are pre-Panda. I was CERTAIN I'd seen a post that explained my idea is a totally viable and good one, but of course now I can't find it. So before I go full steam ahead with this strategy I just want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CEDRSolutions0 -
How much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?
When considering on page / on site seo what process do you use / take to evaluate how much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
If a website Uses <select>to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
If a website Uses <select> to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Need help creating sitemap
Hello, The details of my question is sitemap related. Below is the background info: we are ecommerce site with around 4000 pages, and 20000 images. we dont have a sitemap implemented on our site yet. i have checked alot of sitemap tools out there, like g-sitecrawler, xml sitemap, a1 sitemap builder etc, and i tried to create sitemaps via them, but all them give different results. the major links are all there, but the results start to vary for level 2, level 3 links and so on. plus no matter how much i read up on sitemaps, the more i am getting confused. i read lots of seomoz articles on sitemaps, and due to my limited seo and technical knowledge, the extra information on these articles gets more confusing. i also just read an article on seomoz that instead of having one sitemap, having multiple smaller sitemaps is very good idea, specially if we are adding lots of new products (which we are). Now my question: My question is having understood the immense value of sitemap (and by having it very poorly implemented before), how can i make sure that i get a very good sitemap (both xml and html sitemap). i do not want to do something again and just repeat old mistakes by having a poorly implemented sitemap for our site. I am hoping that one of the professionals out there, can help me also make and implement the sitemap. If you can please point me to the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kannu10 -
Re-Direct Users But Don't Affect Googlebot
This is a fairly technical question... I have a site which has 4 subdomains, all targeting a specific language. The brand owners don't want German users to see the prices on the French sub domain and are forcing users into a re-direct to the relevant subddomain, based on their IP address. If a user comes from a different country, (ie the US) they are forced on the UK sub domain. The client is insistent on keeping control of who sees what (I know that's a debate in it's own right), but these re-directs we're implementing to make that happen, are really making it difficult to get all the subdomains indexed as I think googlebot is also getting re-directed and is failing to do it's job. Is there are a way of re-directing users, but not Googlebot?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
Penguin Rescue! A lead has been hit and I need to save them!
I had a meeting today with a prospective client who has been hit by Penguin. Their previous SEO company has obviously used some questionable techniques which is great for me, bad for the client. Their leads have dropped from 10 per day to 1 or 2. Their analytics shows a drop after the 25th, a back link check shows a lot of low quality links. Domain metrics are pretty good and they are still ranking ok for some keywords. I have 1 month to turn it around for them. How do you wise people think it can be done? First of all I will check the on-site optimisation. I will ensure that the site isn't over optimised. Secondly, do I try and remove the bad links? Or just hit the site with good content and good links to outweigh the bad ones. Also, do you think G is actually dropping rankings for the over optimisation / bad links or are the links are just being discredited rsulting in the drop in rankings. 2 very different things. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpsonGareth0