Is there a Cart that will allow me to have categories ending in html?

Hello,
I am going insane here trying to find a solution to my problem.

I want to move my web site to another host which means having to find another shopping cart, yet I can not find one that will allow me to have control over how the URL's are for categories and products etc. I don't want my category pages to end with numbers, hyphens etc, otherwise I'll lose all my free traffic

I know some who bother to answer this may be wondering about certain things and will want to ask , but why are you.....? etc, but please, I just need to know if such a shopping cart exists, and preferably one I don't have to pay for (or at least not much!) I have around 300-400 products

cheerrs

 

Without knowing too much about your setup, it's hard to get specific.

Both Zen-Cart and OSC

Both have SEO modules that turn very odd .php things into normal html stuff. It uses both a module and some .htaccess.

If you could give more specifics, I could help more.

 

Hi Oziman,
If you look at my wildlife figurines link in signature, you can see that all my categories are html based. Dolphin figurines, elephant figurines and so on, and then any sub categories as well. In fact even products themselves are html based.

What I've noticed with OScommerce is that when I set up a category it comes up with it's own code for it - for eg. /c-1/... this is no good to me as all my traffic comes organically and so if someone searches for dolphin figurines, the page that comes up in the search engines will no longer exist. I will basically lose 94% of all my traffic if I move to a cart that tries to think for itself too much.

So far the best option I can come up with is Paypal! Can you believe that? What's worse is I am not getting any help in OSCommerce forum, or Zen's forum, in fact all I get is people trying to tell me how to completely run my whole business, which is not what I want. It doesn't make enough money for me to make a complete makeover of it, yet the reason I have to move host is because my current host (which is an e-commerce based host) is too expensive.

I really thank you for responding.

Dean

 

take a look at my sites categories :

ferraritime.com/ferrari-chronograph-c-35.html

using oscommerce and end in .html

 

Hi adam1987,
Sort of but how do you get rid of the '-c-35'. I mean isn't a search engine which has indexed a page that ends in Dolphin_Figurines.html going to look at a page that ends in Dolphin_Figurines-c-35.html differently and treat it like another page? If it does that then all the hard work of getting my dolphin page to rank high in the search engines will be lost

Dean

 

i see what you are saying ... im not quite sure but i will try and find out.. i do belive it can be done.

 

Hi adam,
I installed the ultiamte seo urls' fine and now have it working - well at least to the stage where I can insert keywords into the url, but still can not get rid of that little -c-x and -p-x before the .html

I've asked a few on the OScommerce site but still no luck just yet

 

PDshop from Pagedown Technology is a pretty good Search Engine friendly shopping cart and online store... you can take it with you from host to host. You shouldn't worry about the URL that much, it really has little effect on search engine results these days (that's a thing of the past)... checkout http://www.pagedowntech.com/ for PDshop, I have a few clients that use it and get very good search results, and you can even tweak the .asp code as needed.

 

You also need to make sure the cart doesn't show 2 or more different URLs for the same page. Forward URL links should be the same as back URL links to be optimal.

I don't recommend any open-source PHP cart code because I think it is junk. Although there is nothing wrong with PHP, I am not impressed with any open source cart programs that are made of it.

http://www.softslate.com is set up optimal for html or whatever extension you choose to use on the end of filenames. Also their is a CODE field that is used for category and product strings in the URL.

 

Well how disappointed am I.

I wasted 10 days searching for an answer and still the best solution for me is to use Paypal's cart.

The shopping cart industry should be ashamed of itself.

Sure if you're just starting out and don't have established traffic, back links to worry about then that's ok, any cart will suffice, but when you have over 100 category pages, all of them indexed, each category page has between 3 to 80 product pages within, all of them indexed, it becomes obvious that there are just too many pages to start redirecting.

Then on top of redirecting, you have to add all your products into a database, then code the cart's code so it represents somethnig similar to your own business that the public has become used to and...