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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Published in: Search Engine Optimisation

{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }

1 judd@trif3cta 29/09/2008 at 3:56 am: I’ve been involved in a project using it as well and it’s proven to be quite nice.
2 Kenneth Dreyer 29/09/2008 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.
3 Hamish 29/09/2008 at 10:43 am: Hi Patrick,

Which version are you using for party supplies?

Thanks for the review, very interesting.

H
4 Jeremy Luebke 29/09/2008 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/
5 Vinay 29/09/2008 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!
6 Yossarian 30/09/2008 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.
7 nathan 30/09/2008 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
8 Hamish 30/09/2008 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!
9 Bogdan 01/10/2008 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
10 Erin Jones 09/10/2008 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.
11 Steffan Perry 13/11/2008 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.