?3dCart, Magento, Volusion, Zen Cart? Looking for recommendations based on my situation.
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Ryan, thank you for your detailed and in depth answer. I now have more grasp on what is going on. Could you clarify a few things?
- Will I always need a CMS with a shopping cart platform? So I will need to pick a CMS to go with whether I go with Zen, Magento, 3dCart, Volusion, BigCommerce, Xcart, etc? I am a little confused because don't some of those already come with CMS? Or am I TOTALLY lost here?
- You said there are basically 2 types of shopping cart software. One where it stays on your site and the other where it is external? Which is an example of an external one? I do know that 3d cart for example if you dont get your own payment gateway you will be using their system versus your own correct? Is that what you mean?
- You also said- "the cart should provide SEO control over it's pages. The cart should either provide friendly URLs and control over titles, meta descriptions, etc." I am a little confused here. Are you just talking about friendly urls inside the shopping cart or accross the entire site? Does the shopping cart control that or the cms system?
Thanks Ryan!
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Will I always need a CMS with a shopping cart platform?
No, but I would recommend one in most cases. A Content Management System allows you to add content (articles, web pages, etc) to your site as a user or admin. Without a CMS, users cannot add content to your site and admins would have to know HTML in order to create web pages.
Popular CMS solutions run millions of websites each, so you can develop high quality websites faster, with more features and consistency. Without a CMS you are limiting your site's content and also who can add that content.
Which is an example of an external one?
Go to this site: http://www.nationwidebarcode.com/ean-upc-barcodes/
In the right side bar you will see an "Add To Cart" button. Push it. You are instantly taken off the "nationwidebarcode" site and brought to the "e-junkie" site to complete the transaction. Some "shopping cart" solutions only work in this manner.
Accepting payments is a 3 part process:
1. Shopping cart. This is where a user designates what items he or she wishes to purchase. The items are totaled along with any tax and shipping charges.
2. Payment gateway. This is basically the bank authorization. They approve the purchase. These will be secure pages which collect credit card or other banking information.
3. Merchant Account. This is your account which will receive the money.
The above is my understanding of the process. As I shared, this is simply knowledge I have collected and I do not consider myself an expert in this area. If anyone wishes to add their knowledge it would be appreciated.
Does the shopping cart control that or the cms system?
The CMS controls the pages created by the CMS and the shopping cart controls the pages it creates. These are two different systems co-existing on the same site.
Some shopping carts come with built in SEO features. Others do not. Some integrate well with your CMS allowing the CMS to overwrite the default SEO settings.
I really think you would be best served by hiring a developer to build your site. I would recommend checking with friends and other business owners to locate a reliable company. There is a huge range of knowledge, experience and prices. Take your time and locate a developer who will create a site based on your needs.
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I used to work at Volusion and have decent experience with other platforms out there and do lots of seo for ecommerce.
A. Forgot about the CMS. Evaluate the ecommerce platform for its ecommerce, not for making blog posts. For content postings and stuff, make it a subdomain, or make the main site the CMS and the ecommerce a subdomain. (shop.stuffonsale.com)
B. For Great seo for ecommerce you need to run your own fully customizable platform. Volusion has very limeted SEO functions. They are decent for basic sites, but if you want to get into awesome customized category, product, plus other hierarchies then definitely dont go with a hosted cart solution. Companies like Shopfiy are great for selling like 50 t shirt SKUS, but have very limited flexibilty in how the site works.
C. Hosting carts main benefit is you dont have to worry about uptime & tech changes. Hopefully you have someone technical on your team or you have access to a great developer. With ecommerce there is a very HIGH cost of changing platforms at some point in time. You will have hundreds of indexed pages at a given URL structure. If you change then the URL structure with all platforms is different so you would have a big drop in traffic as you start to 301 all the pages.
D. Most platforms now will allow custom design changes at varying levels. Most support custom CSS changes and template changes. Hosted carts will always still be less flexible than a self hosted cart because on self hosted you can truly edit any file that is part of the shopping site. Hosted carts you are limited to what they give you access to.
E. Your last couple questions are kinda vague. You have to have a dynamic ecommerce site, static shopping sites are a headache to manage unless you are talking about just a couple SKUs.
F. I would recommend you find a developer or another person that has created several successful ecommerce sites using different platforms.
Maybe I should write a blog post on how to pick a platform for shopping.
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Hi Luxwork,
I would like to learn and understand more from your reply.
When you say "forget about the CMS", I can understand if you have a store with thousands of items. There are people who spend tens of thousands of dollars developing their shopping cart. But for small sites who are selling around 100 items, do you still feel this way? If the look and feel of the store is not the same as the site, then the user experience and branding will be lessened.
I would ask the same question about the sub-domain. We are not talking about a Nike shop with thousands of items, but a relatively small shop with around 100 items. By moving the store to it's own domain you are losing all the DA of the main domain. Is your advice still to use a separate domain for small shops?
With respect to the costs of changing shopping carts, I agree the costs would be high but if you truly have full control over your URL structures, there would be zero loss from 301s. The structure I am working on setting up is mysite.com/store/productname. If I am successful, then if I was to change shopping carts, the URL would remain identical. That is one of the advantages of having full SEO control over your shopping cart, right?
Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and I would look forward to your blog article.
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LuxWork,
Thank you as you clarified a LOT for me. I have been considering going with a hosted shopping cart solution for one of my new sites and now it appears that is not a good idea. If you wouldn't mind clarifying a few more things in line with what you said.
- One thing the hosted solutions lean on is all the added services such as social media integration, amazon/ebay integration etc etc. So if I were to go with a self hosted solution I will have to have a developer create these things for me when he modifies or creates my site?
- If my stores are generally small 50 products or less and one that is 150 products this still all applies correct?
- Do you have any suggestions for which shopping cart solution would be best for this situation: I would like something that is fairly user friendly, something that makes seo easy to implement and. Maybe you could give me a list of the top 5 best choices and I can do some research on them.
Thank you
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Also, I think that would be a great blog post! There is a real lack of clarification on what peoples options are and what they should be doing based on their situation.
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We deal with many ecommerce clients on a daily basis and have found that those who want to manage their own and dont' want to worry about hosting and all the stresses of hiring a developer like with Magento enjoy using Shopify. Shopify is reasonably priced, we have had good SEO success with it, and has a ton of apps that extend it's functionality. For someone in your position it is worth looking at. Thanks.
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Shopify seems like a nice service but is incredibly expensive for a simple store.
I have two clients with simple stores. They only sell a couple products and generate around 20k sales/month each. Their current shopping cart is "asecurecart" which is only $15/month with no transaction fee.
If they move to Shopify and purchased the minimum $29 plan, the 2% transaction fee would mean $400/month in fees. The plan that works out the cheapest with Shopify is their $179/month plan since it's the only plan without a transaction fee. You are paying over 2k/yr for a shopping cart when ZenCart and other solutions are free.
Perhaps it is sensible for very large stores, or shops with very low sales volumes, but it seems like a very costly way to go otherwise.
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Agreed. We just spent so much time trying to fix crazy magento problems that the price seems worth it even though your right, our clients spend anywhere to 150-300 dollars a month. I guess it just depends on how you look at it and how much money you are brining in. Good point though.
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The more I read the more I become confused lol. I am now considering going with a hosted solution as well as a licensed solution so I can learn for myself which is better.
For my clients sites they will probably need a solution such as Magento as they can hire a team etc.
I however only operate stores that cary 5 to 50 products. I am thinking going with a hosted solution like big commerce or 3dcart will allow me to get it set up worry free and concentrate on my marketing. They seem to tell me absolutely everything can be customized if I hire someone and let them work on the code. Is this not correct?
Any thoughts?
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Re "Forget about CMS"
My comment is in regards to getting an ecommerce solution that has a blog function built in. The Shopify blog system is worthless and has next to zero customizations. I would give it a D in terms of functionality. I meant forgot about the CMS when you want to run a separate blog.Im confused again, are you adding a store onto an existing domain name, or is this a brand new store?
You never pass 100% of link juice if it is from 301's or canonical updates. I dont have a scientific answer but it is probably 65-80% depending upon factors like quality of links and number of links.
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1. It depends upon the level of solution integration. Volusion just uses a lame "share this" button. I actually might write a blog post on the different levels of social sharing. Not all share buttons are created equal. Either way yes, a developer can generally add on the proper integration if the ecommerce allows it. It sometimes requires some advanced changes to the template for all social button integration.
2. Yah I would say 50-1000 products is about the same. That is about 20 categories with 50 products in each category (about average).
3. My picks
#1 interspire
#2 volusion/big commerce
#3 shopify
#4 magento
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I havent looked at 3d cart in a while. I might check it out to see what they are doing.
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I think this brings up a great point about cost of ownership/maintenance. If you need to keep paying people to "fix things"- that really sucks.
Thats why I dont recommend magento to most people, cause I just hear it takes a ton of work to get it setup.
Simple is usually better, but attention needs to be paid on requirements like if you need special reporting, customer features, custom product templates, inventory management and other things that are critical to your business.
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Is ZenCart not listed because you don't like the cart? Or have you not worked with the software?
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Hey Lux,
Hope you can provide some advice since you worked at Volusion. We are using Volusion right now, it was fairly easy to set up but we have now grown to the point where we need to customize the shopping cart and add a blog (they only allow subdomains, which google treats as a seperate domain). We also need to integrate 3rd party apps like freight calculators and Powerreviews, but do not have access to the back end coding, neither FTP SQL support...
I'm thinking we may need to start a domain and build from scratch, as we've invested tremendous resources into SEO and do not want a big hit to our rankings. Any recommendations from you on which platform and shopping cart to use?
Some quick notes on our site:
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1 year old
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1000 sku but will need to expand to 10,000 in the future
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No IT professional (we will need to hire one in the future)
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i have a few customers now that work with magento. they're all satisfied and as far as i can see it's pretty much optimised out of the box already. you can tweak title tags, urls, meta descriptions, on page copy and i've not seen any duplicate content issues. definitely the solution i would chose, were i to open an ecommerce.
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As a retailer i have used actinic, interspire, oscommerce and am soon to release a magento store.
Interspire i believe is now retired and their support for the product was rubbish which was such a pity as it was so easy to use. Actinic are well behind the curvea nd the software was very buggy. oscommerce was a pain but magento i have found to be really versatile and really not so complicated as people say to use.
You can have a designer re-skin it from scratch, buy a template or buy a template close to what your looking for and then just get it modified - this can save a bit of money. There are loads of extensions that are quite simple to install using Magento connect .
The only downside is it is resource hungry, you'll need a dedicated server to really give it the juice it needs and for us the order processing was hideously longwinded - but there are extensions that can help abbreviate it.
One of the hardest things for us was finding a cart that ticked all the usual boxes but also one thats workflow somewhat resembled ours - you don't want to reinvent all your warehouse pick-pack procedures just 'cos your software says so!
Anyway that’s my personal take. HTH.
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Late to the party here. I'm a Magento user with only about 30 products. The reasons I chose Magneto is for it's hangling of multiple languages. It is by far (and I mean really far) the best at handling multiple languages and maintain continuity as far as design, functionality, and SEO.
This leads me to my second reason: Extremely SEO friendly! I've worked with or demoed shopping carts for Joomla, Wordpress, Modx, and other hosted solutions. Magento can be (actually it must be) customized to do anything you want, like localized checkout process, automatic template switching for holiday promotions, e-mail notifications for any action, custom invoices, and the list goes on. Really, the only limits are either your programming skills or your budget.
About resources, I have to disagree with Ryan on this one. I run my instance on Rochen reseller hosting without issues, granted my site is fairly low traffic given that it's for catering and frozen delivery. But I put out mid-90's on both YSlow and PageSpeed, and that's something I don't see very often with other platforms.
Anyway, if you haven't committed, I do suggest getting to know Magento, but you might need to hire a professional firm to handle development.
Kevin
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Hey AHH888,
Wondering what you ended up doing? We're just on wordpress now with a plugin for the cart but are considering volusion. My main concern is loosing the great SEO we have with our wordpress site right now since one or the other will have to be on a subdomain?
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