Best E-commerce Solution - SEO Friendly

[hfranz]

I need to know thoughts on the best ecommerce solution for our company. We currently have one website with our products, that people call and they purchase over the phone.

In the future we are considering adding a different product line, to which we want to be a fully functional online ecommerce site.

We eventually are considering having only a portion of our products on our current site to have the ability to purchase online.

The reasoning is because we sell very high quality products that range from $1000 - $200,000. We would like to have a consumer section and an industrial sectioin. The consumer section would consist of products from $1000 - $10,000 or so. Then the industrial products you would need to call to purchase.

So would it make sense to have a main website that is our corporate site with links to different websites? Or to keep this all in one website and have different directories like so:

corporatecompany.com - links to product-line.com

corporatecompany.com - links to product-line-two.com

or

corporatecompany.com/consumer-grade/

corporatecompany.com/industrial-grade/

corporatecompany.com/the-ecommerce-only-section/

Can a shopping cart be used to turn on half of the products for purchasing online, and the other half to be call in only ? What is the best e-commerce solution that is SEO friendly and also can just play a role of a regular website?

[rhutchings]

My company does something similar.  We sell vacation rentals, and some of those rentals are super luxury product that cant be purchase online.  Here is what i suggest you do:

1. Keep all of your products in the same website, under different folders.  That is the best for SEO purposes and easier to handle from a technical standpoint
2. For the products that you cant purchase online, use the product page as a lead generation opportunity.  The call to action goes to a lead form, rather than a shopping cart or billing page.  You can experiment with what kind of call to action button works the best.  In our experience, the high dollar transactions wouldnt happen online anyway, so people actually expect a contact form or phone call of sorts.  I would make sure the lead form has a clear way to either email you or call you.

If you have more questions, i am happy to answer since we do exactly the same thing.

[hfranz]

Awesome! Thanks. This helps me out a lot. Do you like your shopping cart Software? Would you care to share what what you use? Or any you recommend? Or a company to work with?

[rhutchings]

We actually have our own custom solution, so I cant really speak to the shopping cart software. We didnt want the hassle of trying to figure out how to customize our own carts and dealing with 3rd part solutions that are sub-par.

Edit:  One things we are experimenting with is actually have a "Book Now" button, but that still pops a lead form.  Here is an example on one of our sites:

http://www.vacationroost.com/baja-california-sur/cabo-san-lucas/details-p336778.aspx

i will say i dont like this lead form much, but that a whole different project

[hfranz]

This is what we are looking for Thanks again.

[AdoptionHelp]

If you want lots of flexibility I would recommend Drupal and either Ubercart or Drupal Commerce, depending on the version you go with.

I had a distinctly unpleasant experience with CREloaded, so I would stay away from that project wherever possible.

Also, I second everything Ryan Hutchings said. Keep it on one site to minimize your SEO workload, and always have an interactive call to action even if its not "add to cart".

[hfranz]

Thanks. What are your thoughts on ZenCart?