Need all in one ecommerce site solution

[Aaron Hats]

Just found this thread so hopefully I can help a little.

I am using Volusion and am very happy with it. The biggest complaint I hear from other V users is the high monthly fees. The problems I had with SEO were not related to Volusion but more a poor webmaster. They have a lot of great SEO fields automatically built in so all you need to do is populate those fields correctly. They have a lot of nice design templates but you can also customize the look of the site as we did with our site. Third party apps can not be installed on their servers so we had to put our blog on another domain I already had.

Let me know if you have specific questions.

Aaron

[vangogh]

Not being able to add 3rd party apps is a problem in my book. Aaron, I think you'd be much better off with your blog on the same domain. Your situation now is basically two sites to promote instead of one.

[Aaron Hats]

Not being able to add 3rd party apps is a problem in my book. Aaron, I think you'd be much better off with your blog on the same domain. Your situation now is basically two sites to promote instead of one.

For now, that's ok with me considering I have four domains and just registered two more for our new hat club.

[vangogh]

Just wanted to call attention to this short video from SEOmoz. It's essentially why putting up different parts of your site (main site, blog, etc) on different domains isn't as good as having everything on one domain.

The video is talking about something a little more specific and you might not be familiar with all the SEO terms, but the advice in the video is why I think not being able to add 3rd party applications to something like Volusion ultimately hurts your business.

[seolman]

Just a note on Magento, we looked at it here when we were contemplating what software to use for our EnMart site. My IT guys, both programming and implementation, did an analysis and the conclusion we came to was that it was buggy. It was also pretty new and didn't have a lot of documentation.

Granted, this was a while ago, and things may have settled down some, but at the time I was told that Magento had a pretty steep learning curve.

About how long ago was that Kristine? Roughly?

[billbenson]

Interesting video VG. My question is this. Say a distributor has a bunch of product lines in diverse areas. Say, telecomunications, construction equipment, T Shirts etc. Or suppose you decide to do some affiliate sites, say T Shirts, DVD Sales etc.

Would you really want T Shirt sales as a subdirectory on your web design site?

Now the video pertains to a blog supporting one main site. Presumably that blog is related to the main sites products. That makes a lot of sense. But a lot of people have multiple blogs in "kind of" related fields. It might be very hard to integrate that into your main site?

[vangogh]

Bill, we may want to take this conversation to a new thread, since I think we might soon hijack the original idea, but for a quick response I'd want related things on the one site. If I was selling t-shirts with my company logo then yes I would absolutely sell those shirts on my site. If they had nothing to do with my company or the general theme of my business then no I'd start it on a new site.

Just depends on the business and the specifics of what you're debating adding to the site.

[KristineS]

About how long ago was that Kristine? Roughly?

It was Spring of 2008 if I remember correctly. We were contemplating building a new site from the ground up.

Magento was the program of choice for a while, but after my guys tested it further, they reached the conclusion that the learning curve was too high and there wasn't enough documentation yet to be helpful.

Things might well have changed since then.

[seolman]

Thanks Kristine - I may get one of our Jr. Programmers here to toy with it a bit. If I find anything useful I'll let everyone know.

It was Spring of 2008 if I remember correctly. We were contemplating building a new site from the ground up.

Magento was the program of choice for a while, but after my guys tested it further, they reached the conclusion that the learning curve was too high and there wasn't enough documentation yet to be helpful.

Things might well have changed since then.

Edit - we're just setting up an app with Drupal + Ubercart plugin. I'll let you know how that goes too. Should be interesting.

[vangogh]

Dave I'm currently working on a Drupal site with Ubercart as well. Will be awhile before it's all set though since this client has other things more pressing. I'll be curious what you find out about Magento. I had seen a few recommendations for it, but don't know much about it from experience.