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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