What is the most SEO friendly shopping cart?

by Patrick Altoft on / 25 responses

From experience I hate using shopping carts and find that every single CMS is very SEO unfriendly out of the box (apart from perhaps WordPress).

Can any readers recommend a shopping cart in PHP that is 100% SEO friendly?

The features it must have are:

  • Static urls such as site.com/products/product-name/
  • Ability to 301 redirect any url on the site to any other url
  • Auto generated titles, meta descriptions and h1 tags for each page
  • Ability to over-ride all titles, meta descriptions and h1 tags on each page
  • Content placed above navigation in the html code
  • No session ID’s
  • No Duplicate content
  • Some level of security so it doesn’t get hacked

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.

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Comments

Read the 25 comments below, or add your own!

Tom
June 13, 2008 at 1:32am

ZenCart 1.4? how about 1.5? (hint, zencart is currently on 1.3.8a… so I am certainly HOPING for all of this… but seriously, Avactis looks pretty good too… zencart could certainly be hacked and hardcoded to do most of you want… -Tom

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June 13, 2008 at 3:04am

patrick.
i’m thinking magneto.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

its built from the ground-up with seo in mind and it comes wrapped in rather pretty packaging.

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June 13, 2008 at 7:05am

That’s a pretty tall order but from what I’ve gathered, this may be your best bet (assuming you don’t want to hack some system to pieces):

Interspire Shopping Cart

Magento just released a promising package, but it appears to have some SEO issues.

Good luck with your search, let us know what you come up with.

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June 13, 2008 at 9:32am

Interspire does look good.

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June 13, 2008 at 9:01am

Are you including bespoke solutions in that, or off the shelf software only?

In term of off the self software I’ve been fairly impressed with X-Cart. Most of the features above are available – admitedly some with a bit of hacking.

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June 13, 2008 at 9:31am

I would rather code my own than pay for a product and then have to hack it.

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August 10, 2010 at 4:28pm

Padraic Ryan (www.ryandesignstudio.com) produces excellent x-cart websites, with all of the above built in using the add-on modules available for x-cart and some recoding of the smarty templates for about $3000. Definitely good value for money in my opinion. He also recodes the templates so that the templates use div's rather than lots nested tables.

X-cart v5 will be released soon, which will supposedly include all of the above plus much more in the standard template.

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June 13, 2008 at 10:25am

One of my colleagues just did a similar search with two small changes: any programming language not just PHP; but free and open source software. Depressing as it is, OSCommerce 2.2 with lots of hacks (most important for SEO are Apache-based Search Engine Friendly URLs, Header Tags Controller and Simple Template System IMO) still looks like the best of the bunch.

It’s really surprising this isn’t solved yet, but I’ve other simpler and more profitable problems that I’m going to attack first. I’ll return to this thread later with interest.

PS – this lousy comments box doesn’t work without Javascript.
Now to try changing my permission settings and resubmitting

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Luke
June 15, 2008 at 12:02pm

Interspire Shopping Cart is certainly the best product out there.

Patrick, if you are thinking about marketing a shopping cart platform to your clients I would recommend Interspire.

The support Interspire offer is second to none and they are updating the software every two months with tones of new features.

Their partner program is also second to none.

If you want to sell a online shop to a client I feel that Interspire offer the most features and also less chance of problems occuring with SEO and lack of options.

Well worth a look!

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June 15, 2008 at 8:05pm

That’s easy – heavily customized WordPress. There is no need for any other CMS today. Let me know if you need some help with it.

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June 16, 2008 at 4:17am

Are all the open-source Ecommerce script available in Fantastic vulnerable to hack? How worse are the security holes of ZenCart, OSCommerce, Agora Shopping, etc?

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June 18, 2008 at 4:20pm

You’re looking for something that (unfortunately) doesn’t exist.

Last year I spent a long time looking for an SEO-friendly ecommerce package but didn’t find anything good.

Magento is not perfect but was by far the best option I found.

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June 19, 2008 at 4:12pm

Hey Mate…I am SEO guy and also looking for same which you want..Please let me know once you found it…It would be much appreciate…Thanks :)

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June 19, 2008 at 10:16pm

We use a combo of Joomla 1.0.x and Romancart. It ticks all your boxes.

d

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January 24, 2009 at 6:17am

Apart from Magento, you can also try three low cost e-commerce scripts which are SEO friendly – litecommerce, x-cart and Jshop Server.

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rashida
February 24, 2009 at 9:53am

Here I suggest Zeuscart – The Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software which is an open source and seo friendly package.
http://www.zeuscart.com

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March 26, 2009 at 1:28pm

Hello

Why no body talk about cubecart V4? it is pretty working for me , it has build in SEO feature, and there is also imporved SEO mode for Cubecart V4 now, I am using it since more than 1 year and i found it is ok so far, but i am still comparing cubecar v4 with other shopping cart to use for our new store.

By the way I found Cubecart Most easy and simple software compare to any other shopping cart which i have tried.

If you found better shopping cart please let me know, I am happy to hear.

Good Luck every body

Abdu

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missm
May 18, 2009 at 10:59pm

I recommend Merchant Metrix, formerly known as Apple Pie for an extremely SEO charged shopping cart. These folks understand e-commerce & marketing.With over 10 years experience and technical staff support to take you every step of the way, why go anywhere else. We really are pleased with this company, after spending lotsa ca$h with folks who made promises & never delivered. No, I don’t work for them.

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EJK
July 7, 2009 at 5:38pm

I run a small blog and shop over at toughbookuniverse.com. It’s a wordpress blog, with the wposc package installed, which integrates os commerce with wordpress, so they share the same database. It was a real pain in the ass to configure the way i wanted it to be, but i think it’s been the best solution i’ve found so far. you can check out http://www.wposc.com for more information.

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EJK
July 7, 2009 at 5:39pm

Sorry for the typo, that’s http://www.toughbookuniverse.com

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February 1, 2010 at 6:38pm

I think the best SEO shopping cart is without a doubt Fortune3. I’ve used all of them and none increased my traffic and sales like Fortune3. Fortune3 Online Shopping Cart

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September 2, 2010 at 8:42pm

I have been using Magento for about a year and cant praise it enough.

Heres the website UK Fitness Solutions

I have started from the ground up with no computer knowledge at the start, being a personal trainer.

Definatley recommend it

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December 10, 2011 at 1:54pm

Now, I’m running Opencart because I heard that magento is load very slow. How do you think about it?

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November 1, 2011 at 6:34pm

We run an eCommerce store at http://lorisnewyorkfashions.com and are using Interspire Shopping Cart which others have mentioned. As far as we are concerned it is by far the best option for SEO

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December 10, 2011 at 1:51pm

Hi Patrick, I found this site because I’m searching the best option for SEO for my shop. Now I’m using Opencart but it’s not good when rewrite URL friendly. Did you find the best one?

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