Before You Build Your Online Store
April 25th, 2006
Before You Build Your Online Store - Click to Play the Podcast from Harvey Ramer
There are two routes available to online store owners regarding designing a Web site around a shopping cart. You will choose one that is search engine friendly, or a shopping cart that will hinder your search engine visibility. There are viable reasons to choose either option. My hope is that this podcast will provide a framework from which you can make an informed decision.
Choosing Search Engine Visibility
Simple buy now button solutions for under 20 products:
Database driven solutions:
- Miva Merchant 5
- Karova
- Wordpress Plugins & Themes
- A Theme I developed for Golden Maple Shanty that databases products and uses Mal’s eCommerce hosted cart.
Entry Filed under: eCommerce Podcasts
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5 Comments
1. John Charles | May 13th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Having looked at a LOT of shopping carts, I chose karova in the end. Reason being, it was the only one I can find that offered full designer control over the design via CSS, together with full accessibility (which was essential).
2. Harvey Ramer | May 14th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Thanks John, I’ve been looking at Karova with a great deal of interest. From all I can tell it is an excellent choice for a farily mature business with healthy cash flow.
I’m waiting for a client that will give me the chance to design a store around Karova!
For new businesses or start-ups, the accessibility issues are less important than limiting residual costs where possible. For these, cash-strapped endeavors I recommend everything from buy-now buttons to Zen Cart.
3. FarmGrrl | June 21st, 2006 at 8:50 am
Hi! I’ve integrated Mal’s E-commerce into my WP site at http://www.three-elms.com/soap. I’ve even developed some JS / AJAX to manage the shopping cart widget and adding things to the cart without leaving the site. It’s pretty easy to use and I like it a lot.
The only thing it’s missing is a way of managing inventory. If I could manage inventory via the database, then I could also build my pages dynamically based on queries to the DB.
Do you have an example of the database-driven solution you developed? I’d be interested in its capabilities and if it’s available for others to use. Can you let me know if it’s ‘for sale’ at any price, and what that price might be? I realize that I can just create the tables myself, but the thought of creating an admin plugin to add the products is a bit daunting to me.
4. Harvey Ramer | June 23rd, 2006 at 9:01 pm
I have made a verbal commitment to a client to turn my Mal’s e-commerce theme into a plugin for Wordpress 2.0. However, I will not be creating a method for tracking inventory with Ma’ls since it seems like going against the grain.
For that sort of solution, check out this useful bit of code and look into Quick.Cart for smaller stores.
Zen Cart is great for larger enterprises with hefty design budgets or massive do-it-yourself drive and PHP knowhow.
5. jasonciment | July 12th, 2006 at 3:57 am
have you looked at http://www.webcart.net
it is also a php solution with mysql of course.
it isn’t free, but neither is oscommerce really once you spend all the time configuring and then hosting.