5 SEO Friendly Shopping Carts to Consider.
SEO for ecommerce can be tricky but thankfully there are a number of shopping carts that make the job easy. We’ve listed some of the free shopping carts for you to consider below.
We tested each of these carts including installation, setup and configuration of 5 products. We then set about seeing how quickly and easily it was to optimise each product for on-page SEO.
OpenCart
Opencart is an open source shopping cart that is SEO ready straight out the box. It is remarkably easy to install and configure. The front end comes with a beautifully clean layout that only needs a few minor changes and you have a branded web shop ready to go. It took us only 30 mins from install through to displaying our first product online. It has several payment gateway options including Sagepay, Worldpay and Paypal. The back end is simple and intuitive if a litlle cumbersome at times. Adding products can take several steps and seems to be aimed at novices who have never used an ecommerce store. Whilst this may appeal in the early stages it can be a bit of a pain once you get used to using the store. The dropdowns in the admin section are slow in Internet Explorer and these would be much better if they were replaced by tabs or a split navigation. Not many templates available.
Open cart is free but there is a fee (donation) to remove the “Powered by” credits in the page titles and footer.
Our rating 4/5
PrestaShop
A great cart that is lightweight, scalable and with a great support forum. It took a little while to install and configure but we were up and running within the hour. It’s a 6mb download uncompressed to around 12 mb so uploading can take a little while longer compared to other carts. The back end is brilliantly laid out and easy to administer with lots of excellent features. Setting up categories and products was a snip. Generating SEO friendly URLs is done in the admin by activating a setting then letting the cart generate the htaccess file.
On the minus side there are a few features missing such as downloadable products and product ratings but overall this is a great cart.
Our rating 4.5/5
Magento eCommerce (Free version)
Magento has been dubbed widely as the future of ecommerce and is quite simplybeautiful to look at. The quality of design and layout is by far and away the best we have ever seen however looks (as always) can be deceiving. After installing we soon discovered a few things that we just could not put up with. The first is site performance – painfully painfully slow with some pages taking 20-40 seconds to load. This is just way too long for anyone to wait and can easily result in lost sales. Trawling through the community boards shows this as a common problem with Magento websites. Another (serious) we discovered was that of multiple URLs per product – this is just not good. Think of a site with 1000 products and 25% of accross multiple categories, link dilution, increased spider activity etc., and there doesn’t seem to be any resolution to the issue. At the time of writing the issue is still unresolved/unanswered by the Magento team. To be fair though, the free version is only supported by the community.
As a feature rich ecommerce solution, Magento is fantastic. For SEO and site performance it’s very poor so you have to weigh up losing visitors and SEO.
Our verdict 2.5/5
Cubecart V3
Cubecart is a very popular shopping cart. The free version (V3) is easy to install and fairly fast but lacking in many features of comparable shopping carts. Although it’s free the site has “powered by cubecart” in the page titles as well as the footer. We don’t mind the link in the footer so much but the credit in the page title is just not acceptable and for this reason alone we would avoid using it. Why – because a page title is top SEO real estate and the “powered by” reduces your possible page title combinations. Cubecart do however offer removal for £55 if you so wish.
Cubecart has a great community and the cart itself performs well but the backend unfortunately was far from impressive. We didn’t get as far as placing orders through our own test but other cubecart reviews on V4 are less than favourable. This post however is about SEO friendliness and it would be unfair to mark it down on features. Having said that, as an SEO friendly cart we would give this one a 3 or 4 but for the sheer fact that the powered by link appears by default we have to mark it down heavily.
Our rating 1/5
Ubercart
Ubercart is a very good shopping cart based on the Drupal CMS. This is a great cart if you wish to integrate shopping cart functionality with other parts of your site. This has many benefits for SEO but the main drawback is that you have to install the Drupal CMS – something a lot of people may not have the skills or desire for.
On the SEO front we found this to be very difficult for a novice to configure. After installation you are presented with what looks like a Drupal install then a list of links to configure. If you like that sort of thing and manual control over every file then this is the cart for you. If you want something to plug and play after a few tweeks then we would look elsewhere.
Our verdict – 2.5/5
If you are considering SEO for your online shop why not contact us for a free quote?
Great content. Looking for some press release materials when I stumbled across your site.
Bookmarked!
What do you think would be a perfect shopping cart gallery for a website selling furniture products around 500 or so?