Hey guys, I'd appreciate any advice you can give me here please:

A friend of mine has a high street shop, and in talking about his business, I suggested to him that having a website with an online shop might be a good way to increase business. He loved the idea. Currently he currently talking to suppliers about bringing in some new products and they can easily be sold online.

I'm going to help him do it so I want to do some research into how best to achieve this, and what solution is most suitable to out needs. The jey is "Easy" - easy to build, update and manage etc. I have been looking at OsCommerce as it seems like a popular solution - this site is a great example of the type of thing we are looking for. Anyone have experience with using it?

I know from another thread that there are alternatives. Can anyone tell me if they would recommend any others over OsCommerce, and specifically why?

Search Engine Optimisation is very important. How do I ensure my shopping cart website is seo compatible?

Someone else said I should take a look at Shopify - I had never seen this before but it looks like a fantastic idea! Easy to set up and maintain, not have to worry about the server side, good support, and all the integration already done. The only thing that concerns me is the fact that this is an Irish site and shopify might be quite Americanised...

Any other suggestions or tips for me? I'd really appreciate any advice you can give me on this.
Thanks!
Z

Hi there,
I'm not sure about OsCommerce I haven't used it in a very long time. My personal thoughts are that it is not very search engine friendly without much time spent hacking it.

The example site you gave had url's like this:
http:// www. discs.ie/index.php?cPath=19&osCsid=da2e52cffc87eebd9e8865bc240ac8a4

Unfortuantely it includes what's known as a session ID see bold part. These are not seo friendly because sessions expire or change for each user. This means that indexing them can result in a page not found later. Also sessions ID's tend to cause duplicate content issues.

A good shopping cart system would be one that outputs clean url's

http:// www.discs.ie /accessories/4-color-CD-DVD-Pen-Set.html

Instead of:
http:// www.discs.ie /product_info.php?cPath=19&products_id=26

Also the system should support XHTML output not outdated HTML.

If you want to appear in search results its important that each product has a unique title, description tag and page heading. The product should also include a good on page description.

You could alternatively look into:
Joomla!

Which has several shopping cart solutions, it can generally be made more search engine friendly. In my experience though I don't like either system much oscommerce and Joomla.

What payment solutions do you want? If you just need PayPal I could suggest a better CMS.

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i used joomla and virtuemart for a shop recently - i like joomla and cant complain about virtuemart except that if you want to tweak the style to get it the way you want ( proper integration as opposed to use out of the box - and out of the box it isnt exactly the most beautiful cart i've seen ! ) then it can be hard to find out how to do do certain things - in saying that i still did get it the way i wanted in the end and there is a virtuemart forum which helps. i will be using virtuemart for all future shops unless a client wants otherwise. i found it very easy to use from the client's point of view ( for stocking shop making discounts etc) and it does everything you'd expect it to - also i was able to get it to into kilos and euros without too much hassle.

cant really speak for it as regards seo but joomla can be put into search engine friendly mode. AFAIK a lot of seo stuff for shops is in the wording of descriptions and the like - like titling an image u2-music-cd.jpg as opposed to cd8976876.jpg ( and that sort of thing ). but i think that virtuemart urls are friendly as long as you have joomla tweaked to SEF mode

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osCommerce is an absolute nightmare - adding modules and templating can be a pain.

ZenCart would be my cart of choice, free, open source shopping cart software from Zen Cart

Much easier to add mods and template.

Tom

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