Review: Interspire SEO Friendly Shopping Cart Software

by Patrick Altoft on September 28, 2008

The quest to find a truly SEO friendly shopping cart has been a long one but I’m glad to say it’s finally over. I’ve been testing the Interspire Shopping Cart and its almost perfect.

There are a few issues with the software and I’ve pointed these out to Interspire and they will be fixed ready for the next version of the software which is due in October. Then this really will be the best out of the box e-commerce software on the market.

I’ve used the software to build a party supplies website for a friend, its not finished yet but should be up and running in time for Halloween.

What’s Great

Full 30 day money back guarantee
In-built affiliate program
The URLs structure is excellent – products are just in the format http://www.partyheroes.co.uk/products/Sumo.html so no issues there.
Each page and category has a well optimised title tag that can be overridden manually if required.
Each page also has a meta description tag that can be overridden in the control panel.
The software has Google Analytics support built in.
Support is also included for a product feed to be uploaded to Google Product Search.
Another cool feature is the Adwords campaign generator which creates an Adwords campaign for all your products in a few clicks.
A range of excellent templates included for free
Datafeed import and export.

Drawbacks

Meta descriptions currently default to the main sites description. You can override them for individual pages but it would be better to automatically default meta descriptions on product pages to be the first 250 characters of the product description. Most users won’t bother to manually set meta descriptions for all their products so an automated solution is far better.

The second issue is that changing the name of products causes the URL to change. At present the software doesn’t redirect the old URL to the new one meaning visitors see a 404 and search engines don’t get sent to the new product page. A lot of users won’t realise re-naming products is an issue so it’s important to apply the redirect automatically.

Both these issues are being fixed for the next version.

The Price

The price is $295 to $1795 depending on the features you require. More expensive than most PHP software but less than a lot of commercial .NET systems.

The time it saves can be considerable compared to the time it takes to implement any of the free shopping carts available.

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{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }

judd@trif3cta 29 Sep 2008 at 3:56 am: I’ve been involved in a project using it as well and it’s proven to be quite nice.
Kenneth Dreyer 29 Sep 2008 at 7:53 am: Hi Patrick, Did you test Magento? It has all those features you listed + good solutions for the cons you listed.

Magento is AWESOME for SEO.
Hamish 29 Sep 2008 at 10:43 am: Hi Patrick,

Which version are you using for party supplies?

Thanks for the review, very interesting.

H
Jeremy Luebke 29 Sep 2008 at 2:34 pm: Are those URL’s dynamic or is there a flat file produced? If dynamic, there needs to be some mechanism to redirect to a single case version.

The URLs are http://www.partyheroes.co.uk/categories/Themes/Halloween/

But if someone was to manually type a link to that page I can guarantee you they would link to http://www.partyheroes.co.uk/categories/themes/halloween/
Vinay 29 Sep 2008 at 2:40 pm: Well said.. Kenneth.. I was about to recommend Magneto.. ! Have seen many bloggers recommending them already. But it does have few flaws with duplicate content – same products listed under multiple categories that will result in multiple pages with same product description. But I really believe this should be fixed soon by the creaters or you could tweak them manually!

SEO Advantages of using Magneto (from their features page)

* 100% Search Engine Friendly
* Google Site Map
* URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s
* Meta-information for products and categories
* Auto-generated Site Map for display on site
* Auto-Generated Popular Search Terms Page

Worth a try!
Yossarian 30 Sep 2008 at 2:02 pm: I have heard a lot of good things about Magneto too, I did install it one afternoon to play with it but the skinning/themes mechanism made my head hurt! Though it probably is easy once you get your head around it.

I have been using CubeCart V4 for a couple of side projects, it is pretty good, though has similar floors as Interspire. The URL structure is slightly different and doesnt look quite as nice an example of mine wigtrendz.co.uk/womens-wigs/millie-wig-noriko/prod_40.html (sorry for the link drop i left off http though). Though it does avoid having /categories/ in the middle of the URL which is good.

Some features are missing, but a lot of 3rd party mods fix them like rss feeds, automatic gbase export, and brands etc.

It costs about 90 quid i think for the licence.

I think I might give magento a proper attempt at my next project. If I can get my head around coding my designs into it then I think it could be the best option out of the lot.
nathan 30 Sep 2008 at 2:03 pm: we use magento on a few stores.
it has massive duplicate content issues with the standard install & template/theme
you can control 95% of the issues via robots.txt and custom theme development
custom theme development is a must with magento who cares seriously about seo factors
Hamish 30 Sep 2008 at 2:37 pm: Following Patrick’s review yesterday and Vinjay’s comments on Magento I thought I would download and install it to give it a try.

Well, after I eventually managed to get it installed (the installer didn’t work at all either on my test server or on my shared host) it looked pretty good and full of many good features.

I was able to setup Google Checkout without any problems and was making transactions in Sandbox within a few minutes.

I then thought I would try the Protx module as I use them quite a bit on other sites and the magentoconnect installer wouldn’t complete, it just stopped. I then tried to download another theme and the installer stopped too!!

Looking around the forum it may have something to do with file/folder permissions however, I did exactly as it said and I still couldn’t get it to work. I would even have been happy to download and ftp the files to my server and install them that way however, I don’t think that is possible as I can’t find any links to download the files other than the source files for Magento.

So far I have spent quite some time playing around and although I have a working site, I cannot update anything and given some of the comments and concerns on the forum about having to change file permissions, it does make me a little concerned about the vulnerability of a working store.

If someone has had positive results, I would be happy to hear them however, I think I might just try Patrick’s recommendation and see if that interspire is less problematic!
Bogdan 01 Oct 2008 at 7:39 am: IMHO,

Interspire Shopping Cart is probably THE solution for eCommerce website. A close friend of mine had had many troubles with free eCommerce solutions. However, after he had earned some money, he decided to invest it, and his partner’s suggestion was to actually buy some real software for eCommerce. Then, he bought Ultracart. Pretty good, you’d say. Yes, it was pretty good, but it lacked some features, one of them being not having an affiliate integrated which was really boosting my friend’s sales. He then ran onto Interspire’s Shopping cart and lived happily ever after
Erin Jones 09 Oct 2008 at 1:56 pm: STEER CLEAR OF MAGENTO. Trust me. The code is a mess, you can’t get support unless you pay $1500/year and their roadmap is utter bull. Everything listed on the roadmap never materializes.

Interspire on the other hand are up to version 4.0 – their features blow Magento out of the water (yes including SEO). Their product comes with 50 store templates that are plain sexy, they have drag and drop design mode, full QuickBooks support, 40+ payment gateways, etc – these guys KNOW HOW TO BUILD GREAT SOFTWARE.

Magento is a web design company turned software company. Interspire has been a pure software company for 5 years. These guys are worth every cent – and did I mention their support is phenominal too?

Boo Magento – HOORAY INTERSPIRE. I can’t recommend them enough.
Steffan Perry 13 Nov 2008 at 12:18 am: I second the idea of staying away from magento. The code was horrible written. The load its puts on the server is HUGE. Magento is not internet marketing friendly, SEO Friendly maybe, but that is just 1 area of internet marketing. Adding a product takes forever. There are just too many bugs and flaws to name. I personally dont see magento competing with bigger cart solutions like volusion or zoovy or even interspire anytime soon. If magento was not free, no one would use it just like zencart.
colin 03 Dec 2008 at 5:22 pm: I agree Magento is the very best for SEO and that should be the number one for any one selling online. However Magento has a major flaw… its too slow or needs two servers to run it at speed once you get a few thousend orders, for me the code is also very difficult to understand. I will go with Interspire once the URL address issues are set up correctly, which should not really be too big a job.
pankaj 10 Dec 2008 at 9:09 pm: Hi, I tried to enable seo friendly urls but after that site crashed. Those url or .html are not working.

could you tell me what else I need to modify to make this work?

Thanks
Pankaj
Andy 01 Jan 2009 at 6:49 am: Hi Patrick,

First and foremost, thanks for the great post and blog, just stumbled over it, and enjoying the read. Unfortunately the Drawbacks are still not implemented, I hope they will be included in the Feb release. Also, I hope there’s an option to fully customize urls.

I’ve a couple of qs and wonder if somebody can help.

1. I found InterSpire through Finest Shops, http://www.finestshops.com, who seems to offer great support and ecommerce hosting. Any comments / recommendations about suitable hosting for InterSpire?

2. Do you know if the new update will allow customized urls? And in the root directory?

3. Yahoo! Store allows customized urls, and from the root directory without the /product and /categories folders. Check out myWeddingFavors.com (Brad Fallon) e.g, that seems to have an SEO advantage. Do you agree? Prior to the next InterSpire update, am contemplating building duplicate category pages with customized urls in the root directory. Does this make sense?

Thanks!
Andy
Windsun 13 Jan 2009 at 8:07 am: We are looking at Interspire for a 2nd online store. We have researched about 30 others, and actually tested 5-6 (including Magento), and none of them made the grade for what we need. Interspire looks to be about the best option right now, but we need to find more feedback from actual users, not just feature list readers.

Magento especially has not lived up to the hype it has been getting – I 2nd most of the comments already stated above about spaghetti code, poor documentation, bugs, and extreme server loads.
Anton 14 Jan 2009 at 4:30 pm: Hi guys,

I’m with finestshops.com and we offer Interspire based ecommerce solutions. Right now, we are running a promotion and you can get Interspire store installed and ready to use for free. We will ask you to pay for Interspire license and hosting after 30 days but only if you decide to keep it.
If you are interested, please contact sales @ finestshops.com and we’ll set you up.

Looking forward to work with you,

Anton
http://www.finestshops.com
Anton 14 Jan 2009 at 7:09 pm: Windsun,

If you contact sales @ finestshops.com and we can get you in touch with some of our clients who is running stores on Interspire.

Regards,

Anton
finestshops.com
Andrew Clarke 16 Mar 2009 at 1:45 pm: Very good post and some interesting comments.

We’re in the process of migrating from OsCommerce to Magento. I found that interspire whilst a nice fast package had limited options settings, however one very nice feature was the ability to add a weight to a variable. Magento is very easy for adding a product and options in one go, some of our scales have upwards of 15-20 options/variables and often they are not carried over to other products.

Magento does not allow for this as standard, it would be very handy to have as we have a number of products that have different sizes and weight options. This has a great impact on calculating the shipping weights as the base product may only weigh 15kg, but choosing a certain option can add 30kg, an extra cost of around £7.50 and the margins are already tight.

I will report back when i have got a fully working store up.
Martin 08 Apr 2009 at 10:29 pm: You might want to check out the Interspire forums before considering purchasing from them direct…

http://www.interspire.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=190
Hano 15 Apr 2009 at 10:49 am: I have been involved in a Interspire development for a client who actually got a refund before his 60 days where over.

Interspire is not a SEO friendly cart for several reasons like no clean URL’s and every time you change an item title it rewrites the URL
Support sucks slow not to the point it took often several days of email tennis to get them just started on an issue
Implementation of many features is mediocre at best
It’s quite expensive and the update-upgrade policies and pricing is close to criminal
Updating of a customised cart is very time (cost) intensive and updates are frequent as bug testing and detection is basically done by paying customers
Peter 21 Apr 2009 at 4:02 am: If you thinking about spending money with Interspire I would request access from Interspire to the customer to customer forum BEFORE purchasing, thats where all the customer comments Interspire does not want you to see are and they can be very helpfull in making an informed decission.

Some posts like this can be found there:

I’m thoroughly confused here and share in most of the mentioned frustration.

I recently ‘renewed’ (at least I think that’s what I did) for $359 in February and thought I was covered for any upgrades/bug fixes that would come out in the future. Here’s what the email from ISC said:

Hi ,

You are receiving this email because one or more of your Interspire support and upgrade periods are about to expire in 30 days.

You can renew your Support & Upgrades at any point of time at http://www.interspire.com/clientarea/. Keeping your support and upgrades active will ensure that you can always get updates when they are available and support when required.

My complaints:

* I bought this product in Beta and have found tons of bugs…I haven’t counted them all, but the ‘Shopping Cart’ folder in my email box has 712 items in it.
* I would guess that 50-75% of the upgrades I have done to my cart have broken something.
* I realize that products are unstable in Beta, but even after Beta, ISC was still very much bug-ridden. After a while, I became scared of upgrading the cart because I was afraid of the upgrade breaking something else. I typically waited a week or more to upgrade. I still haven’t upgraded to 4.0.7 and from what I have read, 5.0 and even 5.01 are bug-ridden as well.
* I was not promised…but was convinced by ISC staff before I bought ISC that International USPS real-time shipping quotes would come and they still haven’t.

For the most part, Tech Support has been good and the team has been responsive. Overall, I really do like the look and feel of the cart, but options for shipping has always been the weakest area and it is still not nearly what I would like it to be. Also, this upgrade mess is really a dissapointment to me.

So now I wonder…I just spent $359 a little over a month ago and find out I have to pay more for 5.0? What about version 4…is my $359 going to pay for continued bug fixes or is 4.0.7 the last one? Do I have to upgrade to 5.0 to enjoy bug fixes? Is Interspire going to continue to support two versions?

What did the $359 buy me?
Frank Fernadez 10 May 2009 at 10:29 am: Interspire = arrogant management, highway robbery, empty promises and misleading advertising
Mike 22 Jun 2009 at 12:49 pm: I found a great ecommerce software: http://www.renlock.com

It is a Romanian company with a great product.

I was really surprised by the power and elasticity that they provide.