Just like it says, I am taking over a friends site selling homeschool curriculum and I need an SEO friendly shopping cart system that also works with quickbooks. Please let me know of your experiences. Site examples and what you like or dislike about what you are using or have used. asp seems to be the better choice from what I have read since php needs rewrites done to make it SE friendly. Thanks for the help!
Your ASP vs PHP comment doesn't make much sense to me. I can recommend osCommerce (PHP) form experience. Since I moved to osC my rankings even increased. Just make sure to install Bobby Eastland's (a.k.a. Chemo) Ultimate SEO URLs. They kick ass and will get you to #1 in Yahoo and MSN almost instantly. Also install the Header Tags contribution and you are all set. Alternatively, wait till next month when Bobby finishes his osCommerce fork and you can have all that in the stock installation. Even if you don;t go with his fork but with the standard osC like I have, setting up the above SEO friendly won't take more than 3 hours. If you can find the README (which is easy) you're set. I can PM you examples if you want. Just send me a PM. Quickbooks integration is available for free as well. All Open Source so not a penny to pay and you're in full charge.
I am not a programmer and haven't learned php, so is the mod rewrite thing easy for me to do? (you say 3 hours, will it take me a couple of weeks?) What does fork stand for? Thanks tops!
Outside of having custom software written / created I can recommend opencart and cubecart from previous experience based on the level of knowledge you have conveyed. If you are adapt at jumping into the code then Magento may offer you more options. Depending on how complicated you want to get with your offering you may do well to look at a combination of wordpress and plugins for optimal search engine possibilities. My overall advice would be try to avoid using 'out of the box' settings. What I mean by that is try to change the order of how different tags, category names etc are used to auto compile the titles, urls etc. The more you can customise them and remove the 'footprint' (that is, the similarity to other sites using the same software) the better your chance will be of standing out and moving up the rankings. Obviously, SEO and online marketing in itself is another topic and far deeper than my passing comments here, but from a software perspective, you have a few options. Really hope that helps. Cheers, David
In my experience, use wordpress with a plugin shopping platform (or special themes of e-commerce), I thought it was search engines friendly and easy to use .
This thread is about 4 years past and now people want to revive it? Thanks for the responses, but we have no need right now - I last posted in 2006 about this.