It looks like the management over at Interspire have finally grown spine and have announced that they will no longer “officially” be supporting Interspire Shopping Cart beyond July 1, 2012.

Here is the sneaky little announcement that was posted on their discussion forum:

As you may know if you’ve been following along, our focus lately has been on BigCommerce, which is our SaaS e-commerce offering. BigCommerce has been growing extremely fast since it was launched in 2009 and it’s now very close to reaching 25,000 clients.

When we launched Interspire back in 2003, SaaS was still a new concept and our focus, much like everyone else’s was on perpetually licensed (or “behind the firewall”, as it’s now called) software. Since then, times have of course changed and now most software is delivered on-demand.

As a result, today we’re announcing that on July 1st 2012 we will be discontinuing the following products:

Interspire Shopping Cart
Interspire Knowledge Manager
Interspire Website Publisher

This means that up until July 1st you will still be able to purchase licenses of these products, however on July 1st we will no longer be selling new licenses, upgrades or extra maintenance.

All existing clients will continue to receive support until their maintenance period expires, however after July 1st there won’t be an option to extend or renew any maintenance period.

If you are an Interspire Shopping Cart customer and would like to switch to BigCommerce, then please go here to learn more. We have partners dedicated to assisting with the migration process and you can look forward to dozens of new features which are part of BigCommerce.

Thank you for supporting the Interspire products over the years and we hope they’ve helped you grow your business and revenues. Our focus moving forwards is on BigCommerce and really empowering business owners to take advantage of our SaaS e-commerce offering to grow their business.

Fortunately I decided to refocus my attention on CS Cart quite a while back but still can’t deny that the whole experience with Interspire has left a very sour taste in my mouth and makes me very nervous for all you BigCommerce customers if management get bored with that project to.

Maximising your internal linking structure really does make a huge difference to your “On Page SEO” efforts. Each page on your site passes a certain amount of PageRank through to every page that is linked to from that particular page.

Theory goes that the more often a page is linked to the more important it must be.

Taking this theory into account means we must hand out “link equity” fairly conservatively when putting our pages together, making sure you only link to pages that you have to, or are of utmost importance ie categories and products pages.

Now taking “link equity” into account, one thing that continues to bug me (and some may think that I am a bit pedantic) is the way that Interspire/BigCommerce have set up their templates to handle all these “Add to Cart” and “Choose Options” links that are scattered throughout the site (see image below).

Unfortunately each of these links will pass a little bit of PageRank through to the Shopping Cart Page, which is really not a page that is likely to bring in a lot of search engine traffic. So it makes sense that we really don’t want to link to this page unless it’s absolutely necessary (i.e. the product page).

Now Interspire/BigCommerce do allow you to turn these links off via your administration panel (see image below), but unfortunately the technique that they use to make these links disappear doesn’t really make them totally disappear and they definitely don’t prevent search engines from following the links.

The way that the software application prevents you from seeing these links is through the use of the CSS display:none element. What happens is the link disappears from view on your browser but behind-the-scenes it is still there ready to be followed by the search engine spider. You can see this by looking at the HTML source code (see image below).

The only way to really get rid of these links is to go into your template code and remove them manually. The code that you need to remove will look something like this:

<div class="ProductActionAdd" style="display:%%GLOBAL_HideActionAdd%%;">
<a href="%%GLOBAL_ProductURL%%"&gt;%%GLOBAL_ProductAddText%%&lt;/a>
</div>

The files that you will find this code are in the snippets folder and are as follows:

BrandProductsItem.html
CategoryProductsItem.html
HomeFeaturedProductsItem.html
HomeNewProductsItem.html
HomeSaleProductsItem.html
ProductVendorsOtherProductsItem.html
SearchResultProductGrid.html
SelectGiftWrapping
SideCategoryNewProducts.html
SideCategoryPopularProducts.html
SideCategoryTopSellers.html
SideNewProducts.html
SidePopularProducts.html
SideRecentlyViewedProducts.html
SideTopSellers.html
SideTopSellersFirst.html
SimilarProductsByCustomerViewsItem.html
TagProductsItem.html

As I said earlier some people may find this a bit pedantic, but I can assure you that if your chasing traffic in a competitive niche you need to do everything in your power to make sure that your link equity is getting through to your category and product pages, not your add to cart or login page.

It’s no secret that using heading tags (<h1>… <h6>) is one of many tactics used to successfully optimise a webpage for search engines. While the overall impact using heading tags has on your rankings is somewhat debatable (mostly due to terrible misuse), it is certainly a best practice and you should be using heading tags where appropriate.

What Is the HTML Heading Tag?

According to W3Schools:

“The <h1> to <h6> tags are used to define HTML headings.

<h1> defines the most important heading. <h6> defines the least important heading.”

Heading tag should be used to structure your pages in a hierarchical order

Here Is an Example Of How You Should Be Using Heading Tags

<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<p>This is introductory content </p>
<h2>This is subheading 2a</h2>
<p>This is subheading 2a content </p>
<h2>This is subheading 2b</h2>
<p>This is subheading 2b content</p>
<h3>This is subheading 3</h3>
<p>This is subheading 3 content</p>
<h2>This is subheading 2c</h2>
<p>This is subheading 2c content</p>

So What Is the Issue With How BigCommerce Is Using Heading Tags?

Now before we get started I need to personally state that I do not see this as a huge issue, but because a lot of people do I believe it is worth providing you with a way to fix the problem.

The problem is that most BigCommerce templates have been designed to use the <h2> tag for the main heading of the products, info, categories, news and brand name pages.

Here is an example of the heading in question on a product page:

Many people believe that the template should be changed so that the main heading of the products, info, categories, news and brand name pages be labelled with a <h1> tag rather than <h2>. If you agree with this assumption and want to make a change I have good news for you – it’s really easy to fix and you can do so in less than 5 min.

How to change the <h2> to <h1>!

Converting the tags from <h2> to <h1> isn’t difficult but does require you to go into your template files and adjust the code manually.

I have provided some instructions below for what to do with each of the suspect pages.

Step One

The first thing you need to do is either download your template files via FTP or browse the template files via the design editor within your BigCommerce admin.

Step Two

Thing you need to do is go to each individual file and make the appropriate code change.

Locate the “Panels >BrandContent.html” file.
When the file opens you will see some code near the top of the page that looks like this:

<h2>%%GLOBAL_TrailBrandName%%</h2>

All you need to do is change this to:

<h1>%%GLOBAL_TrailBrandName%%</h1>

Locate “Panels >CategoryHeading.html”
Change

<h2>%%GLOBAL_TrailBrandName%%</h2>

to

<h1>%%GLOBAL_TrailBrandName%%</h1>

Locate “Panels >NewsContent.html”
Change

<h2>%%GLOBAL_NewsTitle%%</h2>

to

<h1>%%GLOBAL_NewsTitle%%</h1>

Locate “Panels >PagesContent.html”
Change

<h2>%%GLOBAL_PageTitle%%</h2>

to

<h1>%%GLOBAL_PageTitle%%</h1>

Locate “Panels >ProductDetails.html”
Change

<h2>%%GLOBAL_ProductName%%</h2>

to

<h1>%%GLOBAL_ProductName%%</h1>

To maintain the correct HTML structure you really should also look at changing a number of <h3> tags to <h3>.

The files that you will be looking at to make these adjustments are:

Locate “Panels > ProductByCategory.html”
Change

<h3>%%LNG_FindByCategory%%</h3>

to

<h2>%%LNG_FindByCategory%%</h2>

Locate “Panels > ProductDescription.html”
Change

<h3> %%LNG_ProductDescription%%</h3>

to

<h2>%%LNG_ProductDescription%%</h2>

Locate “Panels > ProductOtherDetails.html”
Change
[ssourcecode]

%%LNG_OtherDetails%%

[/sourcecode]
to

<h2>%%LNG_OtherDetails%%</h2>

Making It Look Pretty

Changing the template heading tags is going to change the way your site looks (more than likely the headings will be much larger). To rectify this you will need to make some small changes to your styles.css file.

To make the changes you will need to change:

.Content h2, .TitleHeading {
font-size: 1.6em;
font-weight: 400;
padding: 5px 20px;
font-family:Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-style:italic;
background-color:#f4f4f5
}

by adding h1 like this:

.Content h1, h2, .TitleHeading {
font-size: 1.6em;
font-weight: 400;
padding: 5px 20px;
font-family:Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-style:italic;
background-color:#f4f4f5
}

Obviously you will need to make the necessary changes to the stylesheet above to match your theme.

Concluding This Tutorial

If you follow the above instructions you can sleep well at night knowing that your main pages are now more “SEO friendly”. Personally I don’t think it makes any difference whatsoever, a heading tag is a heading tag to Google…. however in saying that I don’t think it hurts to make the changes either.

If you would like to learn more about optimising your BigCommerce site make sure you check out the Free BigCommerce SEO Short-course I have been putting together.

If you have any questions about this tutorial please feel free to leave a comment below.

Good-quality SEO knowledge is without doubt one of the most highly sought after skill sets of anybody that is looking to promote their online store.

Understanding the basics of SEO can save you a ton of cash, whether it be via performing the tasks yourself, or by having the ability to sort through and find an SEO consultant that knows what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately over the years there has been a lot of terrible SEO information dished out by a bunch of self-proclaimed experts, a lot of which I am sad to say has been aimed at leading newcomers up the garden path and into their greedy mits.

Now don’t get me wrong not everything you read about SEO is unreliable, once you start understanding the process you soon realise who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t. The misinformation problem will generally only affect you if you are a SEO newbie and still not sure who and what information to trust.

Fortunately if you are reading this and find yourself in the SEO newbie category you might be in luck. Starting mid-January I will be accepting applicants to a beta version BigCommerce SEO Training Course which will be aimed at:

• helping you better understand the SEO process, and
• give you confidence to perform the basic SEO tasks on your BigCommerce store yourself.

This course will cover the bare basics of BigCommerce SEO and will be delivered online via an as yet to be released members portal.

As a totally new course it will initially be made available to a limited number of people totally free of charge, all you need to do is get on the waiting list with a valid e-mail address to be notified to sign up when the first few lessons are ready.

If you are at all interested in learning more about how to optimise your BigCommerce store please click here to add your e-mail address to the waiting list.

SEO Savvy Store Owner: Hi [Supplier Name], I am just doing some planning for this upcoming year and was wondering what exciting new products you have on the horizon?

Friendly Supplier: I’m glad you asked, because we have a couple of really exciting products that will be available to you in around three months time. We haven’t said anything yet to any other retailers but we will be sending some information to everybody in the next week or two.

SEO Savvy Store Owner: Wow that sounds good, any chance of getting a look at this information over the next few days.

Friendly Supplier: no problem, I can e-mail it all to you this afternoon.

SEO Savvy Store Owner: Fantastic, when will I able to start telling my customers about this?

Friendly Supplier: Any time from now is fine, just remember it’s not available until March 1st.

SEO Savvy Store Owner: As you know I have a pretty well followed blog, is there someone in your organisation that might be interested in answering a few questions via an interview.

Friendly Supplier: We would be more than happy to answer questions. I will forward over the contact details of the guy who has been building the product.

The Early Mover Advantage

As you can imagine our SEO Savvy Store Owner would have left his telephone conversation with the supplier in a very excited state. With one quick phone call he has just obtained information that none of his competitors yet know about.

The question is what is he going to do with this information?

Fortunately, because he has developed an SEO mindset, he realises that if he can quickly get some good quality information about this new product on his website he should easily be able to dominate the search results before any of his competitors are aware of what’s going on.

So How Do You Take Advantage Of Information Like This?

Add to the Product Database

The first thing you must do is add the product to your shopping cart product database. If you know what the costs are, add your margins and start taking pre-orders, if not, you should still add the product, just make it unavailable for purchase until you have more information.

While adding the product to the database seems blatantly obvious, the reason it is so important is because it is vital that you establish the products permanent URL. Having a permanent address will give you the confidence to start directing both internal and external links to the  product page while you are working on your other marketing efforts, and we all know what a pain in the arse it is changing URLs at a later date.

Keep in mind that if it is a brand-new product, a well thought out internal linking campaign will be more than likely all you need to do to obtain the number one ranking (in the short term).

Create Non-Commercial Content

The next thing you should do is start creating some good quality, preferably non-commercial, content about the new product. History has shown us time and time again that in order to attract good-quality external content partners, you need to realise that they are generally not at all interested in linking directly to product pages.

A good piece of quality content (such as an interview with the manufacturer, prototype photos etc) will have a much better chance of naturally attracting those essentially important links from external websites than a straight product page. Good quality content also provides you with the added benefit of being a great way to introduce and launch the product to your existing customers

Another benefit of adding additional content to your site about the product is that it will give you the opportunity to obtain an indented listing (e.g. product page and a blog post). An indented listing will not only push your competitors further down the search engine results page, it will also give you the opportunity to obtain a much higher click through rate.

Distribute to Third-Party Sites

If you really want to get an early stranglehold on the search engine results you can also look at releasing content onto some third-party sites. This strategy can be great for both back link acquisition and increased product exposure. Think of article directories, social media sites, industry blogs etc.

Just keep in mind that these sites will be competing directly in the search results with your site and you will need to be careful that they do not outrank you.

SEO Really Isn’t Rocket Science

I have been telling anyone who is willing to listen that SEO really isn’t rocket science for a fair while now. Once your store has been set up correctly it really is a matter of following a bunch of best practices, working hard on promotion and keeping an eye out for opportunities such as the release of the new product.

If you want to get the jump on your competitors, stop reading this article and pick up the phone to your supplier/manufacturer and see if there’s anything on the horizon that you may be able to take advantage of.

To start off a series of articles on implementing some basic BigCommerce SEO techniques I’m going to recommend something that may seem a little counter intuitive.

The very first thing you MUST do after signing up for a BigCommerce account is block your entire site from the search engines.

Why the hell would you want to block the search engines?

While it is very nice that the people at BigCommerce provide every account holder with a free BigCommerce subdomain (yourname.BigCommerce.com), the truth of the matter is that most people never use their free subdomain once their online store is ready for public consumption.

Most BigCommerce store owners will (and should) ultimately end up using their own domain name (yourname.com), or a subdomain (shop.yourname.com) of their domain name to operate their online store once it is live and ready to use.

While it isn’t common for BigCommerce store owners to use their free subdomain  when their site is ready to go live, I would anticipate that it isn’t uncommon for them to use it in the early stages while they are first setting up their store or evaluating a free trial.

This is commonsense, there really is no point going that extra mile to set up your domain name until you’re certain that you will be remaining with the provider.

There is no problem with that.. right! Well… actually there is…

The Hidden Problem of the Free BigCommerce Subdomain

The problem with using the subdomain while you are setting up is that Google has become so bloody quick to discover and index new websites that before you’re even are aware of what’s going on you have pages starting to pop up in Google’s search results, all directed to your BigCommerce subdomain.

As you continue to add products, categories and information pages Google will continue to pick them up and add them to the search index, all unbeknown to you at this early stage of your shops development.

Ultimately all your hard work setting up will culminate to the point where you’re ready to point your domain name at your shiny new online store and start letting the world know about it.

You follow all the instructions and everything seems to be working perfectly, how could it have gone wrong!

Here Comes the Duplicate Content

After a short while a few pages from your site will start showing up in the search index and to help speed up the process you do the right thing and submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools (more on that in a later lesson).

Everything is going along sweetly, or at least it is on the surface. Ticking away behind-the-scenes there is a hidden problem that you are totally unaware, one that continues to grow bigger by the day.

With your total consent and knowledge, you have happily let Google access your site and index your domain name, but behind-the-scenes, technically also with your consent, but this time without your knowledge Google has also continued to index your free BigCommerce subdomain.

With what is very much an innocent mistake you have allowed Google to place two exact replicas of your website in their search index.

This is what is known around SEO circles as a “duplicate content nightmare“.

What the #@!$% is Duplicate Content?

If you don’t have any SEO experience you’re probably wondering what the big fuss about having two exact replicas floating around Google is. Without going into the technicalities something that you need to learn very quickly is:

1. Google only wants one version of your site, and
2. Google (in fact any search engine) isn’t as smart as many think and has a hell of a lot of trouble initially determining which version they should keep and which version they should toss, ultimately favouring neither version.

Rule 1: avoid duplicate content like the plague!

So How Do You Prevent Creating This Duplicate Content Mess?

I am glad that you asked, because preventing this duplicate content mess is actually very easy… if you know beforehand.

Fortunately BigCommerce allows you to make changes to a very important little file called robots.txt. You can edit this file directly through your BigCommerce store administration panel by going to (Tools >> Edit Robots.txt File).

First thing that you will want to do is make a backup copy of all the information that currently is inside the robots.txt file and paste it into a simple text document. You’re going to need this when you’re ready to launch your live site if the “Revert to Default” button doesn’t work for some reason (never hurts to make a backup).

Once you have your backup copy safely saved away replace the information in the robots.txt with the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This instruction will tell any search engine that adheres to the robots.txt protocol (which any legitimate company will do) not to enter the site.

Disallowing the search engines from entering the site will prevent them from indexing your temporary subdomain… helping avoid duplicate content problems when you’re store is ready to go live.

You just need to remember to reinstate your backup copy when you’re ready to launch your real site.

What should you do next!

If you found this article helpful and want to learn more about optimising your BigCommerce store you’re in luck. I am currently in the middle of putting together a free short training course to help BigCommerce store owners get their head around using of the basic SEO tools that come with your BigCommerce account.

To obtain the free short course make sure you put your first name and e-mail address into the signup form, and I will notify you when the BigCommerce SEO training is released.

Anyone with questions, please feel free to us and below and I will answer them ASAP.

At long last I’m pleased to release the latest update to my Interspire SEO Module.

Version 1.3 is now available to download and has a number of changes as well as a couple of minor new features.

How Best to Handle Pagination?

The use of the canonical URL element on paginated results has sparked a great deal of conjecture about how best to handle the situation. In my last release I removed the canonical URL from the paginated results based on advice provided by a Google engineer.

To be honest, I have not been happy with the results of this change and have had had many requests to return the module back to the way it was. The paginated results were again causing a great deal of duplicate content issues, which I find unacceptable.

After some further testing I have come to the assumption that the best way to handle the paginated results is to use the NOINDEX, FOLLOW meta tag. I find this method is much more failsafe and simply directs the search engines not to index the paginated pages, but continues to let PageRank flow on to the products pages listed. Without the change I was struggling to get all my product pages indexed.

Now I know not everybody will agree that this is the best way forward so what I have done is allow you to select 1 of 3 options:

1. apply NOINDEX, FOLLOW meta tag on categories (Recommended)
2. apply canonical URL on categories including paginated results
3. apply canonical URL on categories excluding paginated results

If you are really not sure what to do just follow my recommendation and go with the NOINDEX, FOLLOW method and monitor the results.

No Open Directory Project or Yahoo Directory Tags

A few years ago a couple of new meta tags were introduced following an uproar among SEO consultants when the search engines decided to display title and description snippets about your website on their serps that were originating from either the Open Directory Project or Yahoo directory.

We all know that directory links are not as effective as they used to be, but if you’re serious about obtaining decent search engine results and you are in a competitive area you really must make sure your site is listed in these major directories.

If you do submit and get accepted into the Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directory you really want to make sure that you enable the noodp & noydir meta tags so that the search engines use your carefully crafted title and meta description rather than the snippets some directory editor decided your site was about.

My recommendation is for everybody to enable these two tags.

There is absolutely nothing detrimental that can happen and if your site is listed in either of these directories you can rest comfortably knowing that you can still control how you want your listing to look rather than some directory editors perspective.

Ongoing Development Of This Project

My plan with this module is to always make it available to everybody free of charge, however I am sure that you would all appreciate that ongoing development can incur a great deal of time and effort.

In order to allow me to spend more time on this mod (and developing others) I have decided to include some affiliate recommendations with the module that I hope you all can take a serious look at. You can rest assured that any product or service that I recommend is something that I have actually used and find useful.

If you have any questions about any of the information above or if you have any problems using the SEO module please let me know in the comments below.

I feel really really sorry for small business owners these days. They have every so-called expert (think business coach) telling them “you need a website and make sure it can be found on Google”. It  sounds soooo easy…. a magic bullet that will solve all their problems.

Having been involved in the Web development/search engine marketing community since the late 90s I feel in a pretty lucky position to know what works and more importantly… what doesn’t!

Unfortunately this is not the same position most small business owners find themselves in, sadly leaving them extremely vulnerable to a range of online sharks and harlequins.

The Game Is Getting Harder… and Easier!

These days getting a website put together is pretty straightforward and relatively cheap. The same cannot be said for online marketing… it’s getting tougher and tougher, which in turn means it’s getting more and more expensive.

Google continues to keep changing the game and the big brands have finally clued on to SEO and are throwing massive amounts of their marketing budget to all types of search related activities.

SEO Is Not Rocket Science!

Now anybody who knows anything about SEO will soon tell you that beyond the basics most of your success will be determined by knowledge, experience, smart technical decisions (i.e. selecting the right software) and more than anything a lot of hard work.

A lot of the tactics used (think link building) are a monotonous and boring slog, but at the same time necessary and extremely profitable if done right.

A good SEO will also tell you that once you know which keywords to target, and your “on page SEO” has been completed, success will generally come down to “he who has most quality links wins”.

Link building is hard work and it’s because of this I thought I would start exploring the opportunity of speeding up my development process by outsourcing some of the early stage search engine marketing legwork (i.e. that I don’t want to do) to a “reputable” local SEO company for my new online store.

My main criteria for hiring such a company is that their service fee is reasonable and the quality of work being performed is ethical and will in no way damage sites future reputation.

Unfortunately, what I discovered has convinced me to do it myself and train somebody up to perform the repetitive low-level tasks.

Using an SEO Company Could Be Dangerous

A typical path for most small business owners looking for SEO services is:

• rely upon the advice of a local website developer (hoping they actually know what they’re talking about), or
• head straight to Google, search for “SEO” and start making enquiries.

It is perfectly logical to believe that any SEO company that is able to rank in the top 10 for a term like “SEO” would have to know what they’re doing and be worthwhile contacting…. surely!

I thought I would test out this process and turn to Google to see what it threw up.

After spending some time speaking with a number of sales rep’s on the phone and then following it up with my own research on the tactics that they are engaging in, I have come to the assumption that most of them provide little more than the basics, charge like wounded bulls, and are basing their success (and indeed their own rankings) on a lot of dodgy cross-linking tactics between their customer sites.

It’s sad that most of the companies that rank highly  for a competitive search term like SEO have resorted to sneaking adding links onto their customers sites back to their site, with the aptly suspicious anchor text of “SEO” or “SEO Company”.

Don’t believe me… do a search for “SEO” on Google.com.au, make a list of the domain names that rank highly and do a backlink search of their domain on Yahoo (search for linkdomain:companyname.com.au -site:companyname.com.au).

Visit a few of the sites that are listed as linking to the company site, scroll to the bottom and check out the “SEO” links in the footer.

I can’t understand why any small business owner would agree to advertise to the world (and competitors) that:

1. they are using an SEO company, and
2. who the particular SEO company is.

Absolutely crazy stuff… and unfortunately I bet these poor customers are none the wiser on what’s actually going on and have no idea how valuable these “little links at the bottom” are to the SEO company.

And if that isn’t bad enough, when you dig a bit deeper it looks like some of these “reputable” SEO companies are actually going a step further and basing a lot of their link building tactics for customers on cross-linking their customers sites!

This is a recipe for disaster! Do you realise how easy it would be for Google to wipe out the entire “network” of customers with one click?

Bags not answering the phone when the shit hits the fan!

What Should a Small Business Owner Do?

If you’re a small business owner do yourself a favour and at least learn some basic information about how to conduct an SEO campaign. I’m not saying that you should do it yourself, and that all SEO companies are bad, but at least do some research on ethical link building campaigns. Make sure you go into any meeting with your eyes wide open with questions about how the company you are looking to work with go about building links.

Here are a couple of articles to help get you started:

• Growing Popularity and Links — SEOMoz
• Link Building Training — SEOBook

If this isn’t a viable option, see if you can hire yourself a really well-regarded SEO and pay them whatever fee they ask to act as a consultant to help you find a long-term search marketing company to work with. It would be worth every cent!

Do you have any bad experiences with an SEO company? Let us know in the comments below.

Choosing a shopping cart is not easy! I’ve spent well over 10 years looking at shopping cart software and I can promise you no solution is perfect.

Like many of you, I initially had high hopes for Interspire Shopping Cart (and still do) but over the past year the Interspire management has really dropped the ball with their communication and software updates, which has encouraged some of us to look at alternatives.

One of the alternative shopping carts that I see popping up from time to time is CS Cart, which I was able to take a close look at over what was a very wet and miserable weekend.

CS Cart Pricing

To be honest, up until recently I had been somewhat suspicious of the quality of CS Cart. I figured that at $285 there had to be something wrong….  it’s just far too cheap for the features on offer.

CS Cart Features

In terms of features, CS Cart is very much comparable to Interspire Shopping Cart’s Ultimate Edition, which is surprising as it retails for $285 US compared to $1,795 US with Interspire.

The CS Cart design is fully customisable and is 100% template driven (using smarty templates). For those of you who are not sure what this means and why it is important you can interpret it as having the core files totally separated from the design elements, making the software much easier to customise and more importantly much harder to break.

On top of this the developers have also provided you with an inbuilt a Block Management feature, which further facilitates the design customisation by allowing the cart administrator to create and drag blocks of content around the interface until the desired look and feel has been obtained. No HTML or PHP skills required!

Unlike other providers, the software allows you to add an unlimited number of products and categories to your catalogue. Fortunately, large product catalogues are pretty easy to manage via the bulk product management or the import/export tools. Quantity discounts, configurable products, digital product delivery and a flexible range of product options round out the product related features.

Logging in via the web-based administration panel allows you to easily and quickly make changes to your store via a large range of configurable options and settings. You can set up an unlimited amount of admin accounts, each of which can be set at a different access level which is great for limiting staff members from gaining access to sensitive information.

The localisation features are strong. There are currently 8 languages translated and the software can be configured to cater for any particular currency, measurement unit, or date-time format. On top of that the software is also able to handle a range of different localised tax calculations (e.g. VAT in England, GST in Australia etc).

CS Cart has included over 50 integrated payment systems and has a flexible range of shipping options that would cover the needs of most online retailers.

There is also a wide range of marketing and promotional tools that include an affiliate program, SEO friendliness, gift certificates, gift registry, reward points, coupons, discounts etc.

I won’t bother with explanation of the rest of the features because it would only be repeating what is on their website, but you can rest assured that it is jampacked and very impressive.

CS Cart Support Options

With your initial purchase you will have access to all major and minor updates for a period of 12 months. If you wish to continue receiving these updates after this time period it will cost $49.50 per year. Your initial purchase will also provide you with either 30 days or 40 credits of technical support.

Support queries are answered via an online helpdesk and are limited to consulting on the functionality of the shopping cart, assisting in your software configuration, resolving issues with the software (or server), and performing minor technical modifications.

Understanding how the support options work is a little bit tricky. It seems that you can either purchase support for one ($65), three ($180), six ($350) or 12 months ($650) or you can purchase between 25 ($35) and 200 ($270) support credits that can be used as needed. (If I have interpreted this incorrectly please let me know in the comments)

The development team also offer a custom development service that allows you to extend the “out-of-the-box” functionality of CS Cart. I was surprised to read that some customers who have previously had modifications developed found their customised work included in the-base software package at a later date, essentially paying for the ongoing development of the cart.

No big deal I suppose, so long as the customer was made aware of this beforehand.

CS Cart Community

It is very impressive to see that there is a strong and enthusiastic crowd of people using CS Cart. The discussion forums are busy and full of helpful and encouraging advice.

There appears to be quite a few active developers offering third-party services and/or add-ons for sale. There also appears to be a range of third-party designers ready to help design and customise the look and feel of your store layout.

The only ongoing negative sentiment I could find coming out of the community was that perhaps the CS Cart developers were releasing software updates before enough testing has taken place, essentially relying on customers to find most of the bugs rather than their own quality testing.

In saying that, releasing software too early isn’t an uncommon practice with software providers and you should never look at upgrading your software too quickly, it’s just a recipe for disaster.

The other negative comments that I could find were that a number of larger e-commerce stores were reporting experiences of dramatic slowing under heavy traffic. I’m really not sure if this is the fault of the software or if they need a better performing web server. Something that’s probably worthwhile looking into it if you’re in the situation of owning a busy site.

Overall, this positive community vibe and access to third-party services bodes well for the future of this shopping cart. A happy community generally reflects a software application that is heading in the right direction.

Summary of CS Cart

Personally, my overall impression of CS Cart is very good, but if you want software that is developed and supported well you should expect to pay an appropriate price. Ongoing development and the associated support is costly and at its current price point I wonder if CS Cart is too cheap (perhaps it is a great time to be buying).

I should add that to date I have had no dealings with the CS Cart team, however if experience with similar software companies is anything to go by there is a possibility that if they don’t increase their price they may struggle to keep up with future growth or even cannibalise their reputation chasing alternative revenue streams (like charging a custom development and then releasing it as part of your software at a future date).

In saying that, this is just my speculation and everything else I can find about CS Cart seems very very positive. I will definitely be looking at purchasing a license in the near future and have no problems recommending people check it out.

What do you think of CS Cart?

As I mentioned above, to date I have no real life experience with CS Cart and am basing this review on their demos and the research that I have conducted online. If you have had any experience with CS Cart I would love to hear them in the comments below.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what direction I want my business to head next and have come to the assumption that I really need to clear my head and start concentrating on one thing at a time.

This all came to me during one of many recent sleepless nights when I decided it’s time to do something with a few of the domains that I have collected over the years.

Like many of you, over the years I have built up a collection of domain names that I have done absolutely nothing with. I’ve always had plans to do something with them and couldn’t bear the thought of anybody else jumping in and grabbing them before me.

While ever they are sitting there doing nothing they are causing me unnecessary distraction.

So What Are My Options?

The range of options available to me (apart from letting the domain expire) include:

1. sell the domain at auction,
2. develop the domain and flip it for a greater profit in 3/6 months, or
3. develop the domain and partner with/or outsource the ongoing work long-term

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

Now life has a funny way of throwing things at you. When logging in to check my e-mail this morning I was surprised to see a strange looking e-mail notifying me of an order from one of the domains mentioned above.

Now I’ve always known this is a great domain — it’s keyword rich and in a niche that it has proven to be profitable online. I’ve had numerous false starts with this domain and my bouts of enthusiasm have been followed by lengthy periods of non-activity…. so why haven’t I done anything about it?

The simple answer is — I just can’t get interested in the topic area… Weddings!

Apart from free beer at the reception, the wedding industry absolutely bores the crap out of me…. hence the reason I’ve had numerous false starts with this site over the past few years.

So the order I received this morning has now become the catalyst for turning my domain portfolio into something more useful.

What Is the Plan?

I already have the site up and running with a few products loaded up in the shopping cart. To get started I have been able to source an account with a reputable drop shipper, so it really make sense to fully develop and market the site to its full potential.

Once the site is attracting decent traffic, and more importantly decent profits, I will then look at flogging it off to somebody to run long-term who is actually interested in the wedding industry.

The other option is, if the site is vastly more successful than I first anticipated I will then look to employ, outsource, or partner with somebody who will take care of the sites day to day activities and keep it in my portfolio of online businesses.

At this stage I’m leaning towards a six-month sprint with a view of selling it privately or at auction on Flippa.

How This All Fits in with Shopping Cart Strategies

For a while now I’ve been struggling to come up with a direction for developing content for this site. Just too many distractions and no accountability!

So what I plan to do is use this as an opportunity to create a collaborative learning environment for anybody who is looking to learn more about selling physical products online by blogging about my experiences.

The plan is to maintain the blog with the steps that I am taking to turn the site into an e-commerce powerhouse. I will be totally honest with what is working and more importantly what is not.

Nothing like putting your balls on the line to prompt some action!

Why Don’t You Also Get Involved?

So if you’re keen to follow along (or even throw tomatoes from the bleachers) make sure you get on my email list for the weekly updates (you can unsubscribe at any time).

I’d also encourage anybody who has been thinking about starting an e-commerce business to also take up the challenge and follow along by putting some of my recommendations into action. If you do, please let us know in the comments below (the more the merrier).