Recently I have been looking at setting up some e-commerce systems using an out of the box solution such as CubeCart, XCart, or OsCommerce. In the past I have always worked with bespoke applications, and my company still predominately does, however there is one huge problem with our bespoke applications, and that is the development time.
Unfortunately more development time = more cost, and my company is not one of the big names out there so the majority of the enquiries we receive are from individuals or SMEs. Individuals and SMEs also contribute to a decent percentage of the actual clients. Therefore most of our current clients do not have the budget for expensive bespoke applications and it can be extremely hard getting new clients if half the quotes they receive are considerably less than what we can do on the cheap!
So I finally decided to try an out of the box solution for a side project of mine, 1st4 GPS, it is not exactly a looker, but give me a break, I can’t design and we got the site + products up within a couple of days while I had to do my normal work.
I had a little experience with CubeCart V3 from an old client and I had read reasonably decent reviews of it. CubeCart version 3 is currently free to use if you leave the “powered by CubeCart” message. CubeCart v4 is the commercial version and costs $179.95 (£89.98) for the licence + copyright removal key. Considering we are setting up a e-commerce site that is designed to generate money you can’t really complain at that price.
CubeCart v4 has some excellent features that I required including:
- 100% Template Driven
- XHTML & CSS Valid
- Payment Modules
- Bulk Export CSV / Google base
- Search Engine Optimisation
It has many more features but the above are what caught my eye.
Firstly the whole system is template driven with valid XHTML & CSS. Basically all the HTML/Design elements are separate from the PHP code, this helps the design process considerably. I am not a design expert so I normally get someone else to do all that malarkey for me. It makes it a lot easier for both myself and the designer when everything is separate. CubeCart is basically split up into 3 main areas. The main index, the content for each page, and the boxes.
The boxes are sort of modules that are included into the navigation. These include the shop categories, shopping basket, search, popular products etc
The content is surprisingly the physical content for each page. The categories, viewing the product, the main index content etc
The index is obviously the thing that contains all the above. It is all nice and simple once you get used to it. My only gripe is that it can be quite easy to tell if a site is running CubeCart. It is mainly related to the boxes such as the session box, mailing list box, featured product etc. I suppose someone with a decent amount of experience in CubeCart could/would make it look exactly how you wanted.
The integration of the payment modules is a godsend to someone like me, we have clients that use half a dozen different payment systems, and I was also looking at increasing development time as much as possible. For my test website I used Nochex. It literally took me 30 seconds to implement it. Ok maybe 2 minutes if you include doing a test purchase.
Maximising the exposure of your products is obviously vital to the success of a e-commerce site. One of the easiest way to get some focused traffic is Google Base. We have integrated it into our own systems with reasonably decent results. For CubeCart I actually ended up paying for a 3rd party module that ran a cron job and allowed Google Base to update 100% automatically. We don’t get a huge amount of traffic for Google base, but it is noticeable, and it is quite focused as it tends to be a search for a specific product so the conversions should be good. The best thing about Google base is it is essentially free traffic.
Finally the last and probably most important thing that caught my eye with CubeCart V4 was the claimed SEo features. Now to be quite honest I always take this with a pinch of salt. SEO is a ubiquitous term when selling anything to do with a website. One mans SEO is another mans spam, so it is always wise to look into the SEO quite carefully.
Over the past year or so, EVERYONE has been banging on about Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs. Yes they are great, and there is very rarely reason NOT to have them (unless you use ASP/IIS on a share host as you don’t get ISAPI_rewrite). CubeCart V4 is no exception, they have gone down the SEF route, which is good considering some of the CubeCart sites i see with session IDs in the URL. The general structure of the URLs is site.com/catagory/sub-cat/product-title/id.html. It is OK, I won’t say great, as I feel they look a little long and does it really need the HTML at the end of it? Also even though it maybe better SEO to have all the categories in the URL it would look nicer as a shorter URL. I am sure these are things that can be adjusted with a little more playing around.
The system also formats your titles to be more optimised, in my case I have product name, sub category, then category this is obviously good, though it does append the site title to the end giving you quite a long site title (121 character in this case).
Under each product or category you can create a custom SEO URL, browser Title, meta description, and meta keywords. If you leave the meta description / keywords blank the site uses the default meta. This is a little annoying as I am lazy and missed this off first time round, I then ended up with a site full of duplicate meta descriptions, and this is not really ideal It would be nice if the site auto generate the meta description from the actual description itself unless specifically defined by the user.
Once the site had been live for a little while, and some of the pages were indexed I noticed another annoying little thing. A large portion of the indexed pages were /tellafriend/tell_2.html or something similar. The page then leads to a form to contact your friend about the product. My site currently has 103 products, this therefore would mean that there are 103 pages like this. That is 103 identical pages! Google is not to fond of this.
Another buzz topic in the SEO industry is siphoning page rank and nofollowing internal links. Basically you want to avoid to much link juice passing to your crappy pages. So I decided to check out where else I may have a few issues and trying to fix them with a few nofollows.
Some of the potential problem areas included:
- Shopping basket
- Login
- Register
- Search/Advanced Search
- Write a review
- Be the first to write a review
Most of the problems seem fixable if you go through your template. It would be nice to see plug-in similar to wordpress that automatically help prevent leaking of page rank, and this is probably where I am wrong. I am expecting everyone else to do the work for me rather than pull me own finger out and do it myself. Though I guess an nice addiction would be for future versions of CubeCart to allow you to add your own custom meta into any of the pages on site. It would allow the user to manage Googlebot a lot easier.
Overall I am reasonably happy with CubeCart for now. It is not perfect, and I am sure a lot of SEOs will slate it for one reason or another. For the price, and the speed it took to set up it is a good choice, especially for the smaller company. If you have a little more time and money I am sure the flaws it does have can easily be ironed out.
My testing has not been the most thorough and we have thrown the site up so it would be interesting to see what SEOs with more extensive experience of the system think of it?
I may set up another store and try out one of CubeCarts competitors. I have not used XCart or Magento, both of which I have heard good things about. I am open to other suggestions too? Though no over priced applications, I would like to keep it under $200/£100 though will try more expensive products if they look good enough.
