Advice for my E-Commerce Site

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andrewprime1

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Feb 26, 2012
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Hello all, first of all, let me just say this is an awesome site, I am a first time poster but I have been a silent reader for a while now. I come to you all today with a bit of a problem that I would like your input on - If you wanna skip the background, go to the paragraph labeled "to the point"

I am working for a small mom and pop gear consignment store here in Salt Lake City, Utah. We do mountain bikes and camping/hiking/climbing stuff in the summer and skiing/snowboarding/winter sports gear in the winter. I was hired to work in the shop[ and also to help them build their online persona and improve upon their bad (like really bad) website and making it an e-commerce site.

I am primarily and SEO/blogger, though I do have a good amount of coding and design experience and my platform of choice is Wordpress. So naturally I set out to build an e-commerce site based on Wordpress. I figured the ease of use would make it easy for the other people who work here to add and manage products...

I started out redesigning the site using a WP theme by Storefront Themes that uses the WP E-Commerce plugin as a shopping cart. That was my first mistake. My experience with both Storefront and WPEC has been very bad, virtually no support, and the WPEC plugin is VERY buggy. Spent a bit of money on oDesk trying to get someone this site running faster by optimizing the code, making it just bearably slow, but still pretty slow, especially on the back end.

To the point -

So you've stuck with my this far, I apologize, I give way too much background let me get to the point: I think I wanna try something else out for this website, WPEC is not working anymore; I am just having too much trouble with it. I was thinking of either trying out a different Wordpress e-commerce plugin, Shopp, or going to a brand new site platform that is built specifically for e-commerce, maybe Zen Cart.

SO my questions are -
1.) Does anyone have experience with either Zen Cart or the WP plugin "Shopp," or have different suggestions for me? Any advice, tips, or warnings are appreciated!

2.) If I go and install a new plugin/theme, or just go with a new platform (i.e. not Wordpress) I am going to be shooting myself in the foot, right? I have lots of ranked product pages which will just be deleted. Is there an easy way to solve this? I was thinking 301 redirects or the canonical tag (which I have never actually used before), but both of these options sound like a total pain in the ass.

Since this is primarily a brick and mortar business, the owner is not interested in spending thousands of dollars on a really mac daddy setup, but we do want something that actually works for our needs... Here is our site (currently offline, damn WPEC) www.2ndtracks.com.

Thanks in advance for your help! Please keep by boss from beating me!

http://www.zen-cart.com/
https://shopplugin.net/
 


We have a site we do for a very similar type of store and we use Market Press Theme on Wordpress. From what you described I think this would be your best solution.
 
Oh man, you are my hero! Market Press (though surprisingly not super easy to find) looks like it could be the perfect solution, it even imports products over from wpec so that takes care of question #2 as well! Would you mind sharing a link to that website by any chance? How is site speed with Market Press? And what theme are you running it on?
 
I have done a bit more research, 200 dollars a year isn't so bad for Market Press... I was looking at how it's now 100% compatible with the headway theme. I know a lot of people really like that theme and it's interface - Might use that as the new theme. Anyone generally agree or disagree with that decision?
 
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2.) If I go and install a new plugin/theme, or just go with a new platform (i.e. not Wordpress) I am going to be shooting myself in the foot, right? I have lots of ranked product pages which will just be deleted. Is there an easy way to solve this? I was thinking 301 redirects or the canonical tag (which I have never actually used before), but both of these options sound like a total pain in the ass
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You'll regret it if you don't do one of:

- maintain the current url structure ( some carts will let you specify the structure, or at least over-ride it on a product/category basis).
- as you mentioned, use 301 redirects

The canonical tag is useful, but doesn't solve the "keep the link juice from the old setup" problem. It's more useful to make sure that multiple paths to the same product don't get indexed.

You might have a look at opencart and prestashop. Both have strong user communities, plugins (some not free) for using just about any url scheme, nice looking themes with ajaxy features, etc, etc. Both are free / open source. You may or may not need some paid plugins though.
 
Thanks, I will look into that. I am leaning toward the Market Press + Headway theme right now though, unless someone can give me a reason not to?
 
thank you
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Hey,

Stick with Market Press - they have a free version that should accommodate. I believe the theme IS market press. Stear clear of Magento and Opencart etc. - not that they are neccisarily bad - just judging your skill level from what you described I think they would be too much hassle and work for you - no offense.

For the 301's (you need to 301 all existing pages you are eliminating to a new page) - Go to xml-sitemaps.com and generate a sitemap for the current site. Any URL's that you do not keep the name of you need to set up a 301 to one of the new pages. Also set up GWT and watch for crawl errors.
 
hello

Store site theme advice?

I need to create a site for my small electronics shop, I want it to look/work similar but without the shopping cart e-commerce stuff. I just want to display my products with an image and description.
I've looked into using wordpress because I'm familiar with it, but cannot find a suitable theme. Could anyone recommend a theme or perhaps even a different CMS I should use that might have a suitable theme?


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