WP Shopping Carts and SERPS

[billbenson]

What is the most popular WordPress cart plugin these days? Preferably OpenSource. Woo Commerce was suggested on a different thread.

I have an older site that uses a cart plugin called Shopp. It is not that popular of a cart from what I can tell and I am considering changing carts.

One of the concerns I have is my old cart has a lot of dynamic url pages that rank well in G. I have been hesitant to change carts because the url's will change and I want to continue to have the pages rank well. What is the best way to change carts and keep page rank? There are several thousand products.

[turboguy]

I would be fairly certain that Woo Commerce is the most popular shopping cart to use with WordPress. I am sure there are other good ones as well. I can't be of much help on the URL.

[davidlee21]

I have used Woo Commerce and eCommerce Shopping Cart. I would recommend both these. Try both and choose one. I feel Woo Commerce is better.

[Harold Mansfield]

Woo Commerce is the most popular and most supported WordPress cart plugin with the most integrations.

I would ask why you want to change carts. Yes, changing carts will recreate your product pages and their URLs. But it's also an opportunity to do better and correct mistakes that were made when you first built your shop.
If the reasons you need to change outweigh the restructuring of your URLs then you need to do it.
If they don't, then don't.

Don't hold on to URLs that "rank well" just for the sake of doing it if you aren't getting sales because of it. "Ranking" means nothing if it doesn't equate into sales. Better to have less traffic that converts at a higher rate than good traffic numbers and no conversions.

[billbenson]

The site has been up for 9 years with the Shopp plugin. Note the name of the plugin is 'Shopp'. I am not using that as a generic term. I had some personal issues and have not been processing orders for several years. the site still gets traffic which most likely can be converted to orders. For good searches it will still come up in the top 5 on Google.

My immediate concern is I am going to find that when I try to activate online orders that part of the plugin may not work or there may be no support for it. I also have programming time right now. Once I take the site 'live' again, I will be hopefully busy dealing with customers and orders which will often put the programming side of things on the back burner. To be clear, the site is and has been active, I just have ignored it and the online order stuff has been deactivated.

[Harold Mansfield]

The site has been up for 9 years with the Shopp plugin. Note the name of the plugin is 'Shopp'. I am not using that as a generic term. I had some personal issues and have not been processing orders for several years. the site still gets traffic which most likely can be converted to orders. For good searches it will still come up in the top 5 on Google.

My immediate concern is I am going to find that when I try to activate online orders that part of the plugin may not work or there may be no support for it. I also have programming time right now. Once I take the site 'live' again, I will be hopefully busy dealing with customers and orders which will often put the programming side of things on the back burner. To be clear, the site is and has been active, I just have ignored it and the online order stuff has been deactivated.

You haven't been processing orders for several years? Start over. Much has changed in the last "several" years. No since in resurrecting an old site, built on old tech, and old knowledge.
If you've been ignoring orders for several years, none of those people are coming back. I would search around online to see if anyone has made mention of the fact that your site is dormant. If so, start over.

You say "You think" you can still convert existing traffic into orders. You also used the word "hopefully". Those are not technical terms based on a real assessment and understanding of the situation. It's wishing.

If you want to start this up again, you need to have real plan based on the reality of things now, and prepare to have to rebuild this business again.
You are not going to just pick up where you left off.

[billbenson]

Well, some clarification. The site was used primarily for lead generation. The product is a consultative sell. At least 95% of the orders required telephone support and I manually entered most of those orders rather than having them entered directly on the web site. Having said that I would like to be able to have orders processed on the web.

Repeat orders were very small. It's the kind of product where someone buys it and doesn't order it or something similar for a year or more.

In 2015 I did about $750k in sales. I quit working on the business for health and other reasons.

Today, I am retired. Having said that, I need some income, social security isn't enough. I don't need a lot though. If I could make $2k / mo I'd be happy.

Lastly, it's a business sitting there. It doesn't cost much other than time to start taking phone calls again and trying to sell the product. There are some details I need to work out, but not a lot to test the waters.

[Harold Mansfield]

Well, some clarification. The site was used primarily for lead generation. The product is a consultative sell. At least 95% of the orders required telephone support and I manually entered most of those orders rather than having them entered directly on the web site. Having said that I would like to be able to have orders processed on the web.

Repeat orders were very small. It's the kind of product where someone buys it and doesn't order it or something similar for a year or more.

In 2015 I did about $750k in sales. I quit working on the business for health and other reasons.

Today, I am retired. Having said that, I need some income, social security isn't enough. I don't need a lot though. If I could make $2k / mo I'd be happy.

Lastly, it's a business sitting there. It doesn't cost much other than time to start taking phone calls again and trying to sell the product. There are some details I need to work out, but not a lot to test the waters.

If you think all you need to do is just plug it back in, then do that and see what happens. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't work.

[billbenson]

That's what I'm going to do I just want to do anything upfront that I can. Hence the shopping cart options question etc. My big concern is not loosing Google placement as that will still be key in getting calls. I have a bunch of php scripts that I have mostly rewritten to make sure things go smoothly.

So if I need to change shopping carts, what can I do to keep my search results intact? I thought about a different site with the same product descriptions etc but using a different cart, but that would be duplicate content. Is duplicate content still a big no no?

[Harold Mansfield]

So if I need to change shopping carts, what can I do to keep my search results intact? I thought about a different site with the same product descriptions etc but using a different cart, but that would be duplicate content. Is duplicate content still a big no no?

I would recommend doing nothing. Install the updated cart so that you can do business, build new links and do SEO to get them ranked again. But no one ever wants to hear that, so here's what you can do and what the pitfalls are going to be.

1. Try and recreate each URL and on page SEO exactly. Depending on how many products you have this could take forever. If you only have 10-20 products, it's worth the attempt. However, the structure of the pages will be different so you're still going to have to redo the work to get them ranked long term. This is a very temporary solution, if it even works. When you change the structure/coding of the page, Google may reindex it like it's a new page.

2. 301 redirect all of your old links to your new links. Also a short lived strategy because Google doesn't like redirects. Also since the old links have no content on them they will fall off. This strategy works if you have inbound links to those pages..as in from other websites. 301 redirect keeps those referral links working for you. But you could also just redirect all incoming links to dead pages to the home page or page of your choice.

Both 1 and 2 will still result in having to do the work later. The bad part is later comes fast and you end up with a complete drop off..except now you're behind and didn't prepare for winter. It could take weeks, or days. Google moves much faster today than it did 5 years ago.

The only other option is to rebuild the cart and advertise to bring traffic to the new site to lessen the blow of having to re-establish your SEO.

I say prepare and set up for long term success now while you have nothing to lose, instead of waiting until you're forced to..because there will be no warning.