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
-
How to deal with URLs when changing shopping cart software to ensure SEO
NSFW ALERT (LINK BELOW) We are changing the shopping section of our website. Currently the products sit on our own website and when a user goes to checkout they are taken to Mals (a shopping cart site). This means our URL’s look like this. NSFWhttps://www.aprilnites.com.au/mascara_vibe.htmlThe new software is Ecwid and we are using this with a site created in RapidWeaver so the URLs will not be clean and will have all ? And # parameters. I’m wondering if this will hurt the SEO of our whole site or just the product pages. I’m also unsure of how best to deal with the current URLs. Should I use a 301 redirect on all of them to take the user back to the home page of the shop. For us the shop is more of a catalogue. Our main website is the most important part but I want to make sure we are following best practice when making this change. Hope someone can help.Many thanks
Technical SEO | | AprilN0 -
Open Graph Meta Description...
Does my html meta description tag have to be the same as my Open Graph meta description? I'm having problems pulling through my meta description into Google SERPs and I wondered if its because my 'OG' data is not consistent? Thanks Guys, Kay
Technical SEO | | eLab_London0 -
How google crawls images and which url shows as source?
Hi, I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example: This is a page of a hotel in booking.com: http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?
Technical SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Having javascript in the top of the source code
Dear Moz-community, In our company, we are torn about the influence of having a ton of javascript on the top of our source code - while our Tech guys are downplaying it's influence, us marketeers aren't quite sure. The link is here: view-source:http://www.bettingexpert.com/tips/football/italy/serie-a It is the javascript that is loaded right after the Would this be a problem with Google? Thank you very much,
Technical SEO | | BetterCollective
William0 -
All images are noindex will opening this at once be an issue?
Hi, All images are noindex will opening this at once be an issue? Not sure how a few months ago all my images were set as noindex which i realized last week. We have 20K images which were indexed fine but now when i check Site:sitename it shows 10 or 12 and the inspect element via Chrome i see the noindex is set for all images. We have been renaming the images and adding ALT tags for most of them and would it be an issue if we change the noindex in one shot or should we do them few at a time? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Unique shop
Hello I have several websites www.example1c.om and www.example2.com and I would like to create e unique shop page where all the users that want to buy would be redirected, something like shop.example.com. Now, each website has its own catalog section but with this new system, if a user clicks on buy he will be redirected to shop.example.com like this: www.example1c.om/catalog click on BUY and redirected to shop.example.com www.example2c.om/catalog click on BUY and redirected to shop.example.com shop.example.com will be on a different server than the other 2 websites. Is it ok if I do a 301 from 1 server to the other server or I can be penalized? thank you
Technical SEO | | andromedical0 -
Good organic rankings but no shopping rankings
My site www.hair1direct.co.uk comes up well in the organic rankings but when I select shopping in Google it does appear. Why would this be? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | avecsys0 -
Add to Cart Link
We have shopping cart links (<a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p"></a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">The SEOMoz site crawls are flagging these as a massive number of 302 redirects and I also wonder what sort of effect this is having on linkjuice flowing around the site. </a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">I can see several possible solutions: Make the links nofollow Make the links input buttons Block /cart/add with robots.txt Make the links 301 instead of 302 Make the links javascript (probably worst care) All of these would result in an identical outcome for the UX, but are very different solutions. What would you suggest?</a>
Technical SEO | | Aspedia0