E-commerce Platforms and Seo Doubts

[shanky1]

Hello There,

I plan to launch my online store with products soon via one of the saas hosted based platforms like shopify &  bigcommerce.

The issue is am trying out to see how this works for us. But then simultaneously we would work towards seo efforts to bring in relevant traffic too.

Later once we grow and I decide to change the entire website based on custom design etc so that means again all the seo work has to be re-done?

How can I avoid this since I have already invested capital and time in building the current saas hosted website and its almost ready to roll out.

Can someone advice the best way forward and possibly a relevant solution

Thanks

Aditya

[ChadBreezy]

This would be a mistake; you don't every really want to try and adapt a project down the road. You can do it, but it will be painful! The biggest investment really is the time you put into the project. Right now time might be your friend and you have plenty of it. But once things start rolling time can become a valuable commodity to your project time lines and task activities set with certain cost. You'll have to start buying time and maybe hire someone to handle some other task you cannot do on your own to solve upgrading your website.

*I suggest planning the scope of your content, product paths, and list them on a white board or piece of paper first.

*List things (in human code) you want and would like to have and come up with a date to upgrade. This could be options, graphical appeal, and many other site usability issues.

*You'll find this to be more manageable and goals set for yourself and business.

I once tried to change the design of a website I ran years ago and it was a very hard process, because I had to keep up with content development, adding custom pages, doing pictures, videos, custom landing pages, competition analysis, link building, content syndication, social bookmarking and other email campaign filter programs and much more.

The SEO part of adapting your site design can also cause some problems too. Typically you want to avoid sudden changes to the complete layout and look of your e-commerce store. You can certainly make small changes overtime (aka upgrades like framework, style of elements and navigation structure).

*If you do decided to redo anything avoid deleting directories, or files that Google has crawled; instead just use 301 redirects to avoid missing pages. Google can be weird. I remember when I launched SecurityCameraWarehouse dot com website, Google took interest in my discount cctv dvr page and other similar ones and ranked them. At the time I decided I wanted to offer a better page that targeted a different keyword, and different design. I actually ended up doing that for like 30 pages and it caused my website trouble. Like Google eventually deindexed my website. This was like 6 years ago!

[shanky1]

Hello Chad,

Thanks for the detailed response. I really appreciate your point of view. At this point of time I am trying to take an offline medium of selling products and create the online store for it. The offline sales model is being converted to an online model and we would eventually only reply on the online sales model.

In india we set forth ahead with saas based hosting model - the problem is that I don't yet know what response is going to be like. We are going to be niche in our segment and not provide a host of goods to ur consumers unlike a regular e-commerce store.

The problems comes when I suddenly decide that since now am getting traction I would like to give a better overall experience to my users and then comes the bitter part of it.

So according to what you just suggested , I should then move ahead with one solution in mind and keep that constant throughout and rather make smaller changes there after.

Another issue is on the hosted environment I can never get back the design / codes etc only the data later on in csv values which is all the more useless.

That would be again a re-build of the entire store online if I decide to get my own open source system in place.

I would also like to ask whether an e-commernce store intended towards a niche segment should be based on some open source app like magento etc and go ahead since i dont have time , resource skills and financial help to build a custom one my self.?

At this point of time I certainly dont have the above hence the saas hosted model was the choice. Tomorrow I may have the revenue to offer a really expansive model and better experience to my end users what then?

This is really scary - can you suggest the best way out

Thanks

Aditya

[William.Lau]

In my opinion, go with Magento or BigCommerce.

Pick one and stick with it as migrating to either a custom or another cart will be extremely expensive and time consuming. Your cost for migration depending on how big your store is can cost the same as the custom cart itself!

In terms of SEO your best options are those two. Shopify and carts like Volusion are not that great at SEO.

I really believe you can suffice on platforms like Magento and BigCommerce mainly because this is what they do. In terms of all in one carts like BigCommerce, you don't have to worry about backend problems and always have some sort of support.

Magento while extremely customizable you will probably run into problems and need to pay for support or customization.

If you have the budget go with Magento since you can customize everything and it will look similar to what you consider a custom cart. Sometimes these custom carts end up being more costly and troublesome than you would like.