Open Source Shopping Cart or BigCommerce?

[Giggy]

Hello,

I have a client who is waivering between switching to an open source shopping platform such as Magento, or choosing a "more SEO Friendly" cart such as BigCommerce.I would love to get an opinion. They would like to control the data (open source) but existing platforms dont necessarily support some SEO efforts, opinions and wisdom welcome. Thanks!

[Nayotanguyen]

If you focus on SEO, i suggest WooCommerce. It is a plugin of WordPress. It is undeniable that WooCommerce + WordPress support friendly SEO. However, Magento is better choice with full powerful e-commerce platforms. Let's read e-commerce market in 2016 at http://blog.litextension.com/the-best-ecommerce-platform-of-2016/

Magento migration tool supports users to transfer store data from old cart to Magento.

[Giggy]

Not sure why my client was not turned on to this, we are trying to figure out our relationship at this stage, some ego jockeying etc. I will do my research and bring this to the conversation. Good news is that I will be part of a 3 part team who will "put in my SEO 2 cents worth" our relationship is getting better and I hope they will make the best decision. As a SEO guy, I have my opinions, obviously. On another note: As far as shoppingcartstrategies.com is concerned, I went their because of your suggestion, and learned a great SEO technique for when my customer is trying-out new vendors with entirely new product categories, it is a great opportunity to be first in search in that new product category. Thanks for the link!

[Giggy]

Yes, Wayne, that is me thanks. Very kind of you. I shall return the favor.

Your site is very sharp BTW.

[Ontarioseo]

Larry, we're actually starting phase 2 of their project (had the first meeting a few hours ago actually). As part of that I'll be revisiting what we did in phase one and what we want to improve upon. Our client initially also felt the same way but changed their mind quickly - I just can't remember why.

If you want I can email you the details I dig up along with the designer/developer comments on the integration. I'll send it through your site contact form - I assume that's you in PA 19348?

[Giggy]

Thanks Wayne,

I prefer my customer to go with BigCommerce, but they "do not want a hosted solution" and they "want to own the files" I think Interspire is the solution possibly, also they need the cart to tie into existing inventory systems.....whew! It would be ideal to bring on a consultant to bring all the needs to the table and properly asses the situation. I would stand behind Big Commerce any day....

So, the the math is.... takeaway some of your "have to haves" to gain more revenue as a result of SEO.

It would be cool to measure and compare this data huh?

In any case, Wayne, thanks for your time...It certainly would be ideal to use BC.

[Ontarioseo]

I have a client who seems to be in the same $ volume ballpark as yours. They migrated to BigCommerce a year ago and I was part of the project. The developers/designers seemed to be able to implement most of my recommendations without too many problems. Like anything there were some tweaks and a compromise or two but overall its been a great experience - the client is really happy and sales are up several hundred percent, due in no small part to how seo friendly BC is compared to their previous solution.

I also found them very receptive to some of my off-the-wall requests, not what I was expecting for sure.

[BrandonB34]

No problem Larry. While insterspire does pretty good out of the box I have found that it still does require some tweaking. Here is a module that will really help you out with applying the canonical URL to your pages along with meta robots.

http://www.shoppingcartstrategies.com/interspire/seo-index-module/

If you have any more questions on interspire please feel free to give me a shout.

Brandon

[Giggy]

OK, we are getting somewhere. Thanks Brandon. interspire makes Big Commerce. I am going to look into this solution a bit further, my client does not want a hosted solution, interspire shopping cart may be everything they need ... they get to keep the code and modify it and it is SEO ready, no surprise there. Thanks for your input, Brandon...you rock!

[BrandonB34]

I have been using interspire for years now and really recommend it. I have not used their hosted version yet but I hear its just as good.

[Giggy]

Thanks James,

No, no in house developers, but they realise the value of open source and can plug in a developer at any point to modify, I suppose the holy grail is an open source CMS shopping cart built with SEO friendliness ...  the reality is the only good shooping cart is BigCommerce, but it is a closed system.

Magento seems to be robust enough for my client, but still not SEO in a box

Thanks James

[Giggy]

Thanks Matt,

The client does about 2 mil in wholesale, and just launched a retail effort, in 2 months they have done 30 grand, ill be helping them with the retail effort only, I do like the features that ecwid has, but fear thet may not be the right size for them or tie into xisting SAP inventory and offer those features, but I will dig deeper into ewid, they seem to have a great product for the right e-tailer.

[TellThemEverything]

Do they or you have in-house developers? If so, going the open-source route will give them huge advantages over time when you want to modify the CMS. I wrote my own CMS years ago and I'm still finding things to improve - and many of my competitors with their OOTB CMS cannot keep up with changes.

[strilliams]

Hi Larry,

I discovered http://www.ecwid.com/ about a year ago and it is a magical application - they have a decent free tier as well for the first 100 products on an account.

There's some information here on how you can ensure ecwid is seo-friendly - http://kb.ecwid.com/w/page/15853308/SEO

Hope this helps, Matt