I imported my OSCommerce contents into Zen Cart onto a different domain. I want all traffic going to my old store to flow to my new store... and I want to maintain page rank and positions in the search engines, etc.. I assume that I use a 301 redirect? Is there an easy way to do this, rather than having to go to each individual product? Is it even worth the effort? Thanks in advance, Keith
Use a 301, but you're not going to get a 100% transfer of rankings and traffic. All type in traffic will obviously go. In my experience best case, you'll lose a little ranking perminantly, and all page rank for several months. If the new domain is actually newly registered, you could lose a lot of ranking and not get it back for a long time. I've seen a redirected site get whacked in google for over a year, and the old domain had thousands of links coming into it. Ideally you must redirect every old page to the corresponding new page. Anything else will definitely result in major lost rankings.
I like magento better than either of the others because the potential to customize it is virtually unlimited. It's also based on a much more recent standard of php coding. It is significantly more complex to modify as you must know the Zend framework, but it's much more flexible if you do know Zend. If you just need a cart out of the box, Magento's probably going to be slower.
Zen is a fairly dead project now, not that many updates. OSC is going strong. Mag is a bit on the hard side for the newbs.
Well, Im not an expert, but according to demos and examples of sites I saw magento looks sooo much better and modern. And I like good appearances. It's looks more proffesional.
Mag threw up a few nice templates and people are head over heels, it's just another sc, nothing amazing.