Marketing with Mike Volpe

I spent a little time chatting with a small business about to re-launch their website with an ecommerce section, and they were asking about ecommerce shopping cart software.  I was not an expert (and still am not) but I've taken a look at 5 sample stores from the Yahoo Shopping Cart and the GoDaddy Shopping Cart websites.  I am not the right person to evaluate the actual shopping cart functions - you will know more about what you need in terms of tax, shipping, data/reports, compatibility, etc.  But, I did look at the page structures and URL for the marketing/SEO factors, and thought a bit about the user experience.  Here are my high level thoughts:

1. Yahoo is much better form an SEO perspective. Each product has a page with a unique URL, with keywords in the URL and a different page title. This is what you should do for SEO.
2. GoDaddy seems to have a smoother user experience.  What I did not like as much about the Yahoo user experience was that when you add an item to your cart and then view the cart, it takes you to a different page/URL that really looks different. Perhaps this is the particular implementation of the stores I used, but I would have preferred it if the shopping cart pages were a lot more like the other parts of the website.

Based on my simple analysis, I would pick Yahoo.  If no one finds your store, then your sales will always be low.

Overall, from an Internet marketing or SEO perspective, this is what I would look for in ecommerce shopping cart software:

1. Each product page has a unique URL and Page Title
2. All of the product pages should be on URLs that are part of your website. The shopping cart itself can be on a different URL if necessary for security reasons. 
3. Avoid URLs that use question marks and numbers/codes in them, look for URLs that contain words readable by a human. For instance, http://www.patiofurniture.com/teak-pattaya-lounger.html is much better than http://www.patiofurniture.com/?cat=6754&size=43546&item=7r6237g
4. You should be able to control the following on each and every page of your website, including product pages: Page Title, Page URL (put good keywords in there), Keywords Meta Data, Description Meta Data, Text content on the page, Alt Text on images.