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
-
Cant find source of redirect
Hey guys, I have a bizarre situation on my hands. I have a URL that is being wonky. The url is redirecting to another url and the 301 redirect is not in my htaccess. There is a 301 redirect in my htaccess but is being overwritten by something else, i.e. whatever is happening in above. So basically URL A should be redirecting to URL B but instead its going to URL C. I know we were not hacked, it's not redirecting to a strange bizarre domain. I have also disabled all of our plugins that redirect (to my knowledge) Any thoughts would be great!
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
What's best practice for cart pages?
i don't mean e-commerce site in general, but the actual cart page itself. What's best practice for the links that customers click to add products to the cart, and the cart page itself? Also, I use vanity URLs for my cart links which redirect to the actual cart page with the parameters applied. Should I use use 301 or 302 redirects for the links? Do I make the cart page's canonical tag point back to the store home page so that I'm not accruing link juice to a page that customers don't actually want to land on from search? I'm kinda surprised at the dearth of information out there on this, or maybe I'm not looking in the right places?
Technical SEO | | VM-Oz0 -
Duplicate Content from Multiple Sources Cross-Domain
Hi Moz Community, We have a client who is legitimately repurposing, or scraping, content from site A to site B. I looked into it and Google recommends the cross-domain rel=canonical tag below: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html The issue is it is not a one to one situation. In fact site B will have several pages of content from site A all on one URL. Below is an example of what they are trying to accomplish. EX - www.siteB.com/apples-and-oranges is made up of content from www.siteA.com/apples & www.siteB.com/oranges So with that said, are we still in fear of getting hit for duplicate content? Should we add multiple rel=canonical tags to reflect both pages? What should be our course of action.
Technical SEO | | SWKurt0 -
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 -
Can you mark up a page using Schema.org and Facebook Open Graph?
Is it possible to use both Schema.org and Facebook Open Graph for structured data markup? On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they say, "you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers." Source - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html
Technical SEO | | SAMarketing1 -
Duplicate content, Original source?
Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content. website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source? If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b? I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content? Any help of advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Anyone tested Open Site Explorer backlink numbers ?
Hi, I am new here and I have noticed that open site explorer reports about half of the links on my page. I am really interested in knowing your perspective on this. cheers, Vishal
Technical SEO | | vishalkhialani0 -
Open Site Explorer - Showing No links
Hello, I have ran Link Analysis report in Site Explorer for my client qtmoving.com http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.qtmoving.com These competitors are the top 3 that consistently appear in the Local
Technical SEO | | CohesiveMarketing
Search top 7 or the Local Search Blended SERP. I don't understand why I have No Internal Followed Links, no Internal Links, and only 2 external followed and external links. This doesn't make sense to me because I know there are links internally and that there are some sites that link back to us: I'm not sure how this can happen when we have the following sites that
link to us:
http://www.bbb.org/manitoba/business-reviews/moving-storage-companies/quick-transfer-ltd-in-winnipeg-mb-14125
http://www.yelp.ca/biz/quick-transfer-ltd-winnipeg
http://www.ourbis.com/617657-quick-transfer-ltd-winnipeg Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Lyn0