Shopping Carts

While choosing the best eCommerce shopping cart for online business website people often ignore the SEO while focusing more on the features being offered by the shopping cart. When they have completed the shopping cart installation, configuration and try to promote the online shop then only they will realize that they are in trouble waters as shopping carts are notoriously bad for the SEO.

So what one should look into the shopping cart Search Engine Optimization? This article investigates some of the most popular shopping carts and their SEO capabilities.

There are plenty of online shopping carts some are free some are shareware and others are commercial “out of Box” and their number is increasing day by day which makes it difficult to narrow down on the most suitable shopping cart.

I will describe the most popular shopping carts and their capabilities with the SEO, all of these are based on php/mySQL.

Following is the list of Best SEO Shopping Carts.

osCommerce

osCommerce

osCommerce remains my favorite and the best shopping cart to work with not only in terms of setting it up, configuring but also for the SEO. osCommerce is, undoubtedly the best shopping cart for the SEO.

The osCommerce SEO contribution – osCommerce: Ultimate SEO URLs, freely and publicly available, is not well capable of providing the full features for SEO. It requires tweaking to make it a perfect tool to utilize the full potential of SEO.

CRE Loaded

CRE Loaded

CRE Loaded, the offspring of osCommerce and free (well almost) script, also offers SEO capabilities but it is limited and tweaking to make it works is little difficult, if not impossible, than that for osCommerce SEO. Since CRE Loaded is more or less becoming a commercial script the free contributions are becoming rare which makes it further difficult to customize for SEO.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart

Zen Cart, another popular free shopping cart and similar to osCommerce, also offers the SEO friendly URLs capability however customizing it further is a difficult task as it is based on Smarty.

Zen Cart is easy to install and easy to use. You can get it up and running in very less time. Some of the features of Zen Cart are:

• Multiple Customer Modes
• Multiple Sales and Discount
• Ad Banner Controller
• Multiple Shipping Options
• Multiple Payment options

X-cart

XCart

X-Cart is a licensed shopping cart. It provides the full SEO capabilities and options to change the Metatags and description for each product.

X-cart features:

• SEO Friendly
• Easy to Customize
• Fast & Secure
• W3C compliant
• AJAX Based components and WYSIWYG editors
• Smarty Template Engine

digiShop

digiShop

digiShop, the commercial shopping cart, offers to enable mod_rewrite in the new version (version 5.3.0) however making it work fully for SEO is not easy task and requires digiShop expert to handle it. If not configured properly digishop SEO module can harm your website for SEO. digiShop SEO mod_rewrite module rebuilds the shopping cart in HTML while keeping the php version of it intact and it requires further tweaking to make it work fully.

CubeCart

CubeCart

CubeCart is an “out of box” commercial shopping cart, the latest version of CubeCart offers SEO capabilities.

Following are some of the features of CubeCart

• Template Driven
• XHTML & CSS Valid
• Inventory Stock Conrol
• Multiple Payment gateway supported

Avactis

Avactis

Avactis is a commercial php/mySQL based shopping cart, it does offer some SEO capabilities.

The unique feature of Avactis is its customizable design.

Avactis features

• Cutomizable to any design
• Multiple Payment Systems
• Create unique design for category/product
• Easy integration with existing web site
• CSS based design