What happens if I 301 Redirect my homepage to a different page on site

[SheffieldMarketing]

If i were to 301 redirect the index page of my website to a page in a different subdirectory of my site would that adversely affect SEO?

Does your home page need to be in the root of your site?

I'm asking because a developer has told me that it would be best to do that since he needs to install OpenCart on the root of our domain...

[SheffieldMarketing]

why wouldn't you put in root and why no subdomain?

We aren't planning on doing a subdomain. We're planning on using two different domains with Multistore

[irvingw]

Not to mention opencart is in Hong Kong which makes reaching for support really fun.

I would definitely not put in the root and would not put on a subdomain, also you need two SSL certs i think, one for each site.

[Johnny4B]

Sorry, I meant of course a subdomian as opposed to a sub directory ... In theory I do not see why it would be an issue to create your new store within the subdomain, I can see why in a subdirectory (with OC)

We use a lot of solutions, as web agency we use what fits the clients, I am assuming you are going down the Open Cart cause the platform itself is open source. e-Commerce off the shelf solutions can be quite expensive ,and a lot of the main ones as expensive as they are ,also insist on hosting with them, which is not what you need.

It really depends on what you want for an e-Commerce solution, do you need the big inventory backend, do you need a CMS.

Foxycart is a brilliant e-Commece solution we use as much as possible ,we use Perch as the CMS if the client needs one. Its so flexible from a design perspective ... and although not free ,is very cost effective compared to some solutions

But it really is horses for course, one mans foe is another mans enemy.

Though we have worked with WP and Woo-commerce ,we have one or two clients still using this platform, and to be honest it works great, considering its all open source, granted modules can cost, but its relativity cost effective to some of the more known solutions, and in my opinion WP is a much more stable platform that OC.

But everything I say up above is debatable ,plenty of people use OC and love it (or at at least tolerate it )

Good luck with your project

[SheffieldMarketing]

I've found every shopping cart software I've touched to be a nightmare. What's your preference?

What do you mean by Add on domain?

[Johnny4B]

I've worked with OC before, its a nightmare at the best of times, I do know there is some issue with the URL rewrite across mulitstores, well I have read of it at least.

Have you considered an add on domain instead

[SheffieldMarketing]

Ok! Yeah I did but he told me that since we are using Multistore across two different domains (not subdomains) that it had to be in the root. It seemed weird to me, I'm trying to figure out if that's the case or not.

[irvingw]

Seems weird. Tell him to install opencart in a subdirectory like we did here

http://spfxmasks.com/store/

[SheffieldMarketing]

The opencart directory (index.php) wouldn't redirect just our home page which is index.html

[TakeshiYoung]

301 redirects will pass on your link value, so it shouldn't have any impact from an SEO perspective. But if your developer installs OpenCart in your root directory, and the root directory redirects to a subdirectory, won't that cause problems for OpenCart?