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Shopping Cart experiences
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- ladbroke
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 166
- Thanks: 4
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Hi ya, I'm wondering what experiences people have had with shopping carts? Any particular favourites? I'm redesigning a site from the ground up for a client, and it has a very clunky shop at present, with 100's of products. I've had a play about with Ecwid, and I like all the features, but SEO bothers me. I've read their articles regarding SEO and what they've done to improve it, but want reassurance from others that it works well enough. Not interested in going down the virtuemart route, as it seems a bit dated.
The basic requirements are:
Search engine friendly url's
A store that bots can crawl easily
Ease of use. Most of the products will be entered by their office staff
Easy integration from a developers point of view (don't want to be messing about with bridges)
I'm leaning towards a hosted cart solution at present, but am willing to listen to any arguments for and against! Thanks.
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- FidelGonzales
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 136
- Thanks: 0
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Depending upon the specific situation, the only self-hosted carts I commonly use are Virtuemart or Magento. Virtuemart, which has made a lot of money for my clients, has its limitations but also its benefits over Magento, particularly when it comes to its ease of use, deployment and modification, but Magento is more of a world class cart with a more robust feature set.
I've tested many others. ZenCart/OsCommerce are a few that I have managed, and I'm not overly fond of them. I steer away from the hosted carts due to limitations in code modification and hosting environments. You may also want to look at OpenCart as well as XCart. I'm sure others will offer their recommendations and other good options I have not mentioned.
I would be interested in hearing more about the specific project details such as industry, product count, category count, type of products and whether you're using Wordpress and Joomla as the framework or blog or whether this is simply a standalone cart install.
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- ssfence1
- Newbie
- Posts: 13
- Thanks: 0
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I have built small 120 item stores in Virtuemart, Magento, and now, Ecwid. Here's my amateur opinion-
Virtuemart is outdated, but very good for SEO, even without the friendly URL's (from what I could tell on 2 of my sites.) Without paid add ons, your customer will probably quit the checkout process before buying the product and never visit your site again.
I then switched to Magento and joined the RT Magento template club, which I HIGHLY recommend if you're going to tackle Magento. Magento is clean looking and has a good checkout process, but far too complicated for someone like me to use out of the box. I never figured out the SEO stuff and my site ranking suffered badly (OK, very badly!
) for several months because of it.
After giving up on Magento, I tried Ecwid and LOVED the checkout process and ease of use in the backend. I pay the 17.00 per month (because I have over 100 items) and can't tell if the additional SEO benefits of paid membership actually helps.
What I chose to do is only use the product code, and build my own pages in Joomla. You easily get the SEF URL's you're looking for, the quickest checkout I have found, and the ability to create "affiliate" stores WHEREVER you want. I have one store backend to manage several websites and its quite simple to embed your store in Facebook pages.(For a noob like me, that is a modern day MIRACLE!) :cheesy:
Use can use Rok Gallery for your product images and place it anywhere in the page you want.
The end result just might be what you were searching for!
Only drawbacks I can think of is that if you had a large store, creating both Ecwid items and Joomla pages would be a pain. It would go pretty fast if you get a good page layout and use it as a template for the others, just switching text and editing the product code for each item/page.
I think Ecwid is going to do extremely well competing with other carts due to its simplicity, cost, and auto updates.
Best of luck!
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- FidelGonzales
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 136
- Thanks: 0
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I like the evaluation. I'd say you're at least a bit more than amateur. You've been through the paces, and I agree with your assessment.
I have also considered the method you're using now for small sites and have done it using PayPal on a very simple site that happened to have worked out very well. Though, I'd be more inclined to use K2 or possibly one of the directory components such as Sobi or JReviews so media (photos/videos/downloads) are automatically integrated into easily edited templates and items may live in multiple categories. Add to that functionality, you also have the ease with which you can CSV import and export data into either of those systems, making it easier for larger product databases.
I would lean more toward either JReviews or possibly K2.
Keep us posted on the project. I would love to see how it evolves.
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- MountainTechworks
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 203
- Thanks: 0
- I was wondering if any of you guys have used ejunkie? I have used it for online memberships for download and works pretty good. Vary simple to use and you can embed pretty much anywhere. I must say that virtuemart is outdated i feel also.
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- ladbroke
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 166
- Thanks: 4
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thanks for all the comments and feedback, much appreciated! The limitations of ecwid are a little off putting, such as not being able to have a simple module displaying latest offers etc. Also SEO is concerning, but it does seem to be addressed by ecwid with the html version of the store. I just hate those ugly URL's! With a massive amount of.products creating SEO pages in joomla for the store doesn't appeal, but I can see its benefits for smaller stores. The client has 3 related companies, so Ecwid appeals in as much as it would be simple to replicate the store in the other sites. I am going to take a look at the other suggestions offered also though.
**edit** Just seen Arifin's explanation of featured product module here: www.rockettheme.com/forum/index.php?f=47...42843&rb_v=viewtopic
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- FidelGonzales
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 136
- Thanks: 0
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Yes. Great topic.
I don't stay up on it much, but there are platforms similar ecwid that may be a better fit. If you were to use it, you may want to consider the double content factor that the ecwid site itself would pose when also populating your site with its products.
And although I haven't used it yet, it may be wise to consider the multi-site functionality of Magento. It is worth note that Magento sites may also make use of its mobile app, starting somewhere around $900 per year.
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- john mayfield
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 135
- Thanks: 0
- i know this is an old thread but this is relevant to my interests. i am building a store in ECWID and i have to say i love it... one thing i would like however is to replace the "item image" on the main product page with a gallery, as was mentioned earlier in this thread... that is, when you click on the item from the category page, instead of just an image with the options and add to cart on the right side, id like the image to be a gallery... is there any way to do this easily?
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- rikatos
- Rocketeer
- Posts: 55
- Thanks: 0
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To add some experiences of my own
Virtuemart - Have dropped it now as its way to fussy for out of the box. Great if you like poking around but end user not really.
RedShop - Was with this system from the begining still have 2 shops with it, had great potential but is terrible 'out of the box' and you need to know how to code. Way to quirky and buggy at the moment.
Magento - Put off by prices and ran away so cant comment!
Hikashop - This is one to look out for. I was blown away by how easy it made integrating and how incredibly flexible it is. Yeah some modifications need a little coding but the forum support is amazing. Free and paid versions, Have 2 stores on free and 1 on a paid one very happy with its direction at the moment.
ECWID - interesting, have it on a development server at the moment, seems good value, looks great and easy to use, a good one for a end user I am thinking.
I work as a media manager for a marine safety firm, so not affiliated with any of the above etc !
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