Open Source Shopping Cart or BigCommerce?
-
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!
-
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.
-
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!
-
Yes, Wayne, that is me thanks. Very kind of you. I shall return the favor.
Your site is very sharp BTW.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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!
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Establishing our web pages as the original source
I'm currently working on a recrutiment website. One of the things we do to drive traffic to the site is post our job listings out to a number of job boards eg. Indeed. These sites replicate our own job listings which means that for every job there are at least 5-10 exact duplicates on the web. By nature the job boards have good domain authority so they always rank above us but I would still expect to see more in the way of long-tail traffic. Is it necessary for me to claim our own job listings as the original source and if so, how do I go about doing it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | shr1090 -
E-Commerce: Random Cart ID Redirects
Hi All, I'm having an ecommerce cart issue. Basically, each time a purchase is made, the cart pops up with a unique id (eg www.mysite.com/cart.php?action=add&product_id=3728), This is being caught by MOZ scans as an individual page in some instances. Could I simply add Disallow: /cart.php to my robots.txt to nix this issue? In theory it should keep all subsequent query strings from being indexed, right? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | G2W0 -
Duplicate Title - Shopping Website
My website is showing with errors due to duplicate titles, these errors add up to over 150 errors. The problem is a lot of my products are similar, just in different lengths, colors etc. For example
Technical SEO | | adelemaree
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots/48-classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots-blue.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/31-classic-candy-button-short-chocolate.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/28-classic-candy-button-short-black.html How can I avoid this error without having to merge all my products and colors into one page? As that would make my catalogue look too small! Thanks in advance0 -
Is it a good idea to use the rel canonical tag to refer to the original source?
Sometimes we place our blog post also on a external site. In this case this post is duplicated. Via the post we link to the original source but is it also possible to use the rel canonical tag on the external site? For example: The original blogpost is published on http://www.original.com/post The same blogpost is published on http:///www.duplicate.com/post. In this case is it wise to put a rel canonical on http://www.duplicate.com/post like this: ? What do you think? Thanks for help! Robert
Technical SEO | | Searchresult0 -
Double problem: mobile friendly site and shopping cart page duplication
I have a website that has two issues related to SEO: 1) the main website (product.com) is not mobile-friendly and 2) I have a shopping cart site (buymyproduct.com) using Magento that basically duplicates our product pages that exist on the main marketing website. Uses click "buy now" on a product page and are sent to the checkout at "buymyproductnow.com". The company cannot overhaul product.com website right away and our shopping site (buymyproduct.com) uses a responsive theme and works well for iphone and iPad so I am thinking of making buymyproduct.com the mobile-friendly version of our website by using a sniffer on product.com and forwarding users to the mobile friendly version. If I add canonical references from the shopping cart product pages and articles back to product.com associated pages, will this lessen the blow to any seo issues? What other factors am I missing/need to consider Complicated and painful. Maybe doing nothing right now is best. Thanks for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
Meta description showing in source code but not being detected by SEO Moz or other tools?
Hello fellow SEO enthusiasts, Re www.appetise.com Our developers have added a meta description and I can see it when I right click on pages to 'view source' as follows : Example : BUT - using the on page seo assessment tool on SEO Moz (and also using other tools which assess title, description and keyword optimisation) - they are telling us that the meta description is not present. Please could someone suggest why? If we can get the meta description picked up - we will reach A Grade for our core pages! And this will make us feel good - and hopefully shine through in our results :-). Any help greatly appreciated. Kind Regs, Richard Best - Appetise.com <meta http-equiv="description" content="Online Takeaway Food with appetise.com. 100's of Local Takeaways Menus Online. Order Take Away Food Online for Delivery. Pay by Card Safely. Including Pizza, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Kebab."/>
Technical SEO | | E-resistible0 -
How to put news on your site from other sources and is it a good idea
Hi i have seen this site and have been watching it for some time and really like it. I would like to put news on my site for one topic and would like it displayed like this site does but i am not sure how they do it. here is the site http://www.topix.com/uk/grimsby I use joomla so i am not sure you can do exactly what they do where they have so much of the story before being sent over to the main site. Also i would like to know if this is a good idea or a bad idea as i am thinking this could take away my juice from my site any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860