The scenario: A limited budget and more limited knowledge of coding and SEO make choosing a shopping cart software for a website a frustrating task. If you have no idea what I’m talking about then you needn’t read the rest of this article. Enjoy your customizable open source build from the ground up world. If this is your predicament, welcome to the club and read on.
On a discussion thread at High Rankings, an online storeowner wasn’t fooling around with shopping cart options. The shopping cart chosen needed to be SEO friendly out of the box and produced for purchase (not open source) by a reputable, “mature” company.
In other words: a low-priced cart you don’t have to take any classes to get working and won’t lose any precious sleep modifying. Just add water, if you will.
The SEO gurus were helpful enough, if they could lower themselves to proprietary options. Packages from Actinic, X-Cart, Interchange (suggested from the open source insistent), SecureNetShop, and Nexternal were tossed around as viable options.
But perhaps the most useful suggestion in the thread was to check out SEOshoppingcarts.com a shopping cart review and comparison site. They have a nifty chart that tells if a software package satisfies all the requirements the operators of the site look for.
The only one that did was PDG Shopping Cart from PDG Software, Inc. The review called the cart “impressive.” The search engine friendly cart doesn’t require company hosting and run between $400 and $1000. The only limitation, says the review, is that it may not be the easiest one for beginners.
ICN’s AceFlex got a nice review as well. Praised for being rich in features, it was knocked a little for not being SEO friendly enough.
For more information on shopping carts, check out this WebProWorld thread, where the champs discuss the subject (and everything else!) at length, whether you want them to or not. Looks like a pretty helpful thread-AceFlex and Actinic seem to be fairly popular suggestions.
Hat tip to SEO Roundtable.
