Category: e-commerce

When recommending software to clients I usually recommend something I would use myself. From now on I may rethink my behavior.  When recommending Interspire Email Marketer to a client I mentioned that you only have to pay for it once, run it from your own server and you can remove the Interspire branding from your messages. This is software I would use myself.

I thought the fact that this could save thousands of dollars a year in mailing cost  and remove cheesy branding was enough to make it the clear winner.

My clients however don’t have the computer skill to re-size an image and rather than learn how to do so would rather pay thousands of extra dollars for software that re-sizes images. They don’t care that every e-mail they send says  “Email marketing by CONSTANT CONTACT. TRY IT FREE.

In the future I’ll be recommending whatever is easiest for the non computer savvy, price be damned.

After years of building websites and getting them to rank well on the search engines I finally decided to take a stab at building my own on-line store.

Even with a good amount of internet savvy creating a store is no easy task. Over the last week I have spent untold hours creating accounts and testing the products from the following suppliers.

• Shopify
• Network Solutions - CommerceSpace
• Go Daddy Quick Shopping Cart
• ProStores - an ebay company

My first decision was to just go with something quick and easy,  so I took a look at shopify, Network Solutions - CommerceSpace,  Go Daddy Quick Shopping Cart and ProStores - an ebay company. I did not like any of them for the following reasons. I’m a big SEO guy and I like to have full control over things like page titles, descriptions, keywords and header tags. I also like the ability to add a blog (preferably wordpress) to the package.

Shopify: Argh, looks ok but very little SEO control.
Network: Solutions: I can’t justify paying $34.00 a year for a domain name when I can purchase them for $7.00 - overpriced and no “Free Trial”
Godaddy: A decent user admin, great SEO tools, crappy templates, no FTP access. If they had better templates I would have gone with this option but every template they had looked like it was from 1997.
Prostores: Pretty good looks,  decent SEO but not enough control over the templates and no way to add a blog.

After reviewing these hosted solutions I decided the only way for a control freak like myself to build what he really wanted would be to host my own and have full control over every aspect.

Later today I’ll be installing OS Commerce and Magento on a test server to take them for a spin. Both are open source.

For anyone reading this I just saved you a week of trial and error. If you want something nice that performs well on the search engines and you don’t want to spend a lot of money you are going to have to build it yourself!

Update: I just finished my OS Commerce Install. The install was easy, the out of the box usability is lacking. Anything cool you want to add you have to do it by hand. There are hundreds of modules you can download from the user community. Some are free but many are pay per module.  SEO friendliness is not something you get out of the box. There are no SEO friendly URL’s, unique page titles, descriptions or keywords.

Update - Magento is the winner. It blows all of the other open source e-commerce solutions out of the water.
Pros: looks great out of the box, very SEO friendly
Cons:  A bit complicated and runs slow on a slow server. Solution? Read the book and run it on a fast server!