Building an online shopping website
About July last year I went googling on the net for some product I could purchase at wholesale price and sell to the public via an online shop. After searching high and low, I came across a lingerie wholesaler. Now I had a product, I now needed a solution to help sell my product online. Writing something from scratch was out of the question, I simply didn’t have the time or energy.
I spent some time researching for a great out of the box shopping script. I tested Oscommerce, but decided the code was a bit complicated to use, however there is quite a lot of community mods and most of them free of charge. I also tried Zen Cart, which is basically Oscommerce but with some of the most useful community mods installed my default. I also came across Cre Loaded, again same story. It is Oscommerce with useful mods built in.
The cart I decided to go with was Cube Cart. It seemed a lot more simpler than the other carts and code was well written and the whole package just seemed less cluttered. One issue with this solution was that it wasn’t search engine friendly and there was no SEO mod. I was faced with a dilema, go with one of the Oscommerce spin-offs or write a SEO mod. I decided to stick with Cube Cart and write the SEO mod. I am glad I went down this road, as I have learnt a lot in the process and my mod is now widely used. A quick search for “running with search engine friendly mod” in google will give you a fairly good idea on how popular it is. There are also many others using my mod without the link in the footer as they have purchased a license. If you are building an online shopping website, I recommend trying out Cube Cart and running it with my SEO mod.
Cube Cart shopping script
My SEO mod for Cube Cart
And oh, if your in Australia or New Zealand, then make sure you head down to my lingerie site Intimate Wear and purchase something for your partners! That is my lingerie site if you haven’t guessed already!