Ecommerce platform

[wseabrook]

Hello all,

My digital agency is starting to focus on building mainly bespoke ecommerce platforms. I've used a variety of open source platforms over the years, most of which I find un satisfying - specifically Magento (as the framework is very cumbersome).

I do appreciate that many SEOs love magento, especially with the shopping cart control - being able to track conversions and customer data handling onsite Etc.

My question is, what do ecommerce specialist SEOs and CROs want from a good ecommerce platform please?

Thanks

William

[LesleyPaone]

Let me address this on two levels, first being that unless your agency has hundreds of guys and is willing to develop a year into dev with them, you will have a hard time stacking up against the competition in so many aspects. Take Magento for instance, do you know how many years of security their are in it. How many bugs have been found, how many hours it took to get it to where it is.

Now for an answer to your question (I specialize in e-commerce and SEO related to) so I will give you the things that the platform I use does not have that I would like.

• The ability to easily set category paginated pages to rel=canonical the main category page
• The ability to easily set any page to a no-index
• The possibility for category pages to be able to use different descriptions per paginated page
• Backend editable robots.txt and htaccess
• Extreme analytics. Something like can be done with segment.io, where you can see a users real name, what page he landed on, what pages he looked at, whether he bailed out of the process and where he did. Sure you can do this with GA, but you cannot associate a name with them, or you violate TOS. I want to see that John Smith landed on my widget x page, then went to my sprocket page and came back to my widget page. Then he went through the checkout process and bailed out on the shipping step. I want people to be able to call John and ask him if there was a problem and know real information about him.
• Variables for everything. If I want to have a different title tag on an image than the alt tag, I would like some where to enter it.
• Good adwords integration, this can go great with the extreme analytics.
• This kind is covered by the other one, but really good stats, I want to see what products are popular in what countries, what products are popular, break it down by age if I require someone to enter an age on the account form, and sex too.
• Built in review engine that is a mix of trust pilot and yotpo. I want to automatically mail people for reviews, then I want to post the reviews to google automatically.
• Also easily export data for google trusted stores.
• Might as well have an export for google shopping as well.
• I would like to see it hook into Moz and Raven's api. How handy would it be to look in a back office product list and see a row of icons telling what needs to be adjusted SEO wise with a product. You can see at a glance which ones are duplicate or which ones have meta issues.
• Have a dashboard for Moz and Raven as well, where you can see mentions and things from the sites back office dashboard.
• A grade on demand button in the product page could be pretty awesome too, that used the Moz page grader.
• The ability to convert normal search pages into top level landing pages complete with the ability to change on page components.

This is what I can think of off my head for the moment. It seems every day I have new feature ideas.

[MoosaHemani]

Lesley nailed it!

I highly agree with the point that if you are looking for a customized (bug free) bespoken ecommerce platform you probably need dozens of developers and years of time to come up with the kind of ecommerce you ideally need.

There are tons of open source platforms available and almost every platform is missing one feature or the other. If you ask me the platforms I will prefer to my clients are:

-          Open cart

-          Megento

-          Joomla

-          Wordpress

And more…

Hope this helps!!

[wseabrook]

Thank you both for your responses - Lesley thanks for the lengthy reply.

Plenty of food for thought