LP Web Development supply and install a range of ecommerce applications that can be conveneniently grouped in three ranges:

Ecommerce is the specific description for the type of website that sells products directly through the site, with a checkout procedure that organises payment, tax, and shipping. Usually, this process requires a credit card, and therefore a crucial requirement for ecommerce sites is one or more payment gateways, or methods by which credit card payments are processed. Commonly used gateways are Sagepay, Protx (both with PayPal), and WorldPay with DCC*, though other options are available - a capable ecommerce solution will have around 500 payment gateway options available, and code for new ones can also be created.
* DCC = direct currency conversion, where customers see the prices in their own local currency.

Other names for this type of website are eshops and shopping carts, though perhaps the latter is more appropriate for a smaller facility used as a CMS plugin.

Commercial ecommerce applications

In the past we installed open-source ecommerce but no longer do so. Currently, we think that only commercial solutions offer the quality, search success and usability that we need. However, this doesn't mean that costs are elevated for smaller sites, as there are good-quality small commercial solutions. For example the software license might be only $200 or so for this size of site.

With larger sites the software cost is still low enough that it is not really an issue, and hosting costs become more relevant. There are various arrangements for monthly or annual hosting and management options.

Ecommerce CMS

The fastest-growing website market sector is without doubt the ecommerce CMS area.

We currently supply three product lines here, ranging from smaller sites with under 2,000 products through to giant sites with unlimited numbers of products, using multiple databases. The cost of a smaller system is not unreasonable and this option should be considered if you have interesting content that can be published along with your products.

Of course, there is a valid opinion here that all ecommerce sites should follow this approach, since it makes for a much-improved site and helps tremendously with search success. This is because your content will probably be unique, with custom-written text and images - but in the store, the product details may be identical with those on 1,000 other sites. Obviously, your own content will be far more successful in search.

Choosing ecommerce

Take your ecommerce project and isolate the costs from marketing or similar. Decide your initial ecommerce budget and your annual budget, then break the annual budget down into a monthly sum. Work out how many products you will have to start, at 2 years in, and possibly in 5 years. Do you have content that needs to be published along with your products? Then, ask your providers what the options are with all this data.

Remember that you must have a marketing budget or you will be invisible. On Main Street, even if you don't spend a cent on marketing a few passers-by might drift through your doors. Online, you are completely and utterly invisible unless you promote your business. There is nothing less visible than an online business with no marketing budget, except perhaps a black hole.

Ecommerce factors

There are a very large number of factors that might be taken into account but here are some of the most important. Of these, the two most important without a shadow of a doubt are search viability and visitor usability. Never compromise in these two areas because your project will never achieve full potential if you do.

We have a lot of experience with many different ecommerce platforms, and those two areas are where we now concentrate our main resources because they always pay off better than any other approach. Quality (which certainly includes search compliance) and usability rule. Here are the factors you can consider:

• Quality - measured by many code, legal and other considerations - but ultimately by search success. Not all factors are visible with an inspection of the site, and even an analysis of the pagecode doesn't give all the answers since the way the application works is important. Some ecommerce solutions are brilliant in search and some fail miserably.
  
• Usability for the visitor. Vitally, crucially important, especially where purchases are not made on the first visit to the store - which probably applies to most sites. The site must be easy to use, and visitors must be impressed by how easy, so that they return and make their purchases. If some are so thrilled by how easy that they actually email you to tell you this, then you know you have succeeded.
  
• Good code. This is a search success factor but hard to evaluate for non-experts.
• Initial software license cost.
  
• Wholly-owned, or leased, or with an elevated monthly hosting cost.
• Content handling ability - how easy is it to publish text, images and videos on the site?
• Product number capability - many sites have less than 1,000 products so it isn't an issue. It will be if you have 50,000 products though. This determines the class of application to be used. A large number of sites have about 2 or 3,000 products, so almost any application could be used.
  
• Stock management capability - some applications have simple arrangements, some have every possible bell and whistle. You must choose, for example, if you need spreadsheet uploads and stock level displays in the front end - or if all that is not relevant to your operation.
• Accounts package integration - there is a point at which an ecommerce site should integrate their accounting software with the backend, or the manual workload becomes too high. A few high-value sales will not be difficult to manage, but bulk sales are very difficult to manage efficiently without accounts integration and stock management capability.
  
• Localisation - the requirements for US, UK, and Euro sites are different. You have to state your hosting location and your market area/s, then decide the options.

...and a few more options of course that are best discussed with your supplier.

The ecommerce SEO advantage

We are experts with ecommerce SEO and can prove it. An ecommerce site is one of the hardest types to work with as frequently the code is of low quality, the product details are identical on a thousand other sites, there is no text, image naming is sub-optimal, the URLs are appalling -- and so on. Ecommerce SEO is hard.

In fact there are several well-known cases of big-name SEO firms, who make a lot of noise on the Net, failing miserably with ecommerce applications and being sacked. This is not the right area for search marketers, it's a hard-tech area where technical background is everything. 

Because of these factors our ecommerce sites do extremely well against the opposition, and it's not unusual for a medium size site under our management to place right at the top of the search results along with monster multinationals with over 1 million links. Quality is the key - as always.

Here are some applications that fit into the various classes mentioned:

MivaMerchant
Commercial, large scale, capable - Miva is a mid-market application that will handle a large number of products. We have various US and UK-based options. SEO is difficult and has defeated famous SEO names, but we place our Miva sites at Google #1 of course. The backend is very capable and all options are possible. There are a reasonable number of plugins, or developers can build to suit. A capable site to handle 100,000 products can be set up for under £5,000 / $8,000, with design and functionality additions raising this figure. Under £7.5k / $12k is the norm, for a large and very capable site that will handle very high product numbers, high traffic, and place at the top of the search results. Costs vary according to product migration numbers, design issues, and so on.

Miva's main technical feature is that it uses compiled code, not text-based code. In addition, that code is proprietary. This means that security is exceptionally good. It also has some other advantages, for example the admin backend is probably the fastest of any web application. When installed at a good webhost, a page save goes live and the admin view resets in under half a second - it is lightning fast. 

Setting up a capable site with Miva is really only suitable for specialist developers as it is too complex for ordinary owners and webmasters to build with. Once set up correctly by a specialist, it is extremely easy to use for both the owner and the visitor. In fact the visitor usability is of the highest level. Search success is also first class. When all factors are taken in to account, Miva is very hard to beat: speed, security, ease of use by the owner, visitor usability, search success, ROI, backend capability, core code quality, pagecode quality, functionality, features and SEO. In our view it needs a Miva specialist to get full benefit, though. As an example, there are some poor reviews of Miva on the web, where novices were flummoxed by it; but we put our Miva sites at #1 in search, buyers email our site owners to tell them how easy the site was to use, and the owners find the sites easy to manage.

ClickCartPro
Commercial, smaller scale - CCP is a useful ecommerce application for remote install on any standard server, at a very realistic cost. Like all ecommerce software, SEO is much harder than with ordinary websites, but results are good for technical SEO specialists. Costs are much lower than for Miva since this is a PHP-MySQL application. Good developer support means that much is possible. 

Ecommerce CMS
This is one of the fastest-growing areas on the web and developers cannot keep up with demand. An ecommerce CMS adds good content handling to the shopping cart backend, and is probably what all capable ecommerce software should be aiming at. The problem is that this type of application is about the most complex there is, so that very few developer teams can cope.

For small-scale operations, Joomla-Virtuemart is a good choice. It has the best content handling of all, and its ideal product number range is up to 1,000. Joomla is probably the best CMS option for SEO, so commercial success is not difficult to achieve for CMS / ecommerce specialists. This system is perfect for sites with a smaller number of products, and that need the best content display capability of all.

If the budget permits then eZpublish ecommerce CMS version is a good choice. This is an enterprise-class semi-commercial open-source solution that rivals anything available from the large commercial suppliers. It is a PHP application, meaning that support is not excessively hard to find. A dedicated server is best, which will not be a handicap in this cost range because the minimum installed cost is likely to be £20k / $30k plus.

For budget ranges between Joomla-Virtuemart and eZpublish, we have a custom commercial solution that starts around £9k / $14k and upward. We specify this when an ecommerce CMS solution is required that comes in at a realistic cost, with any and all options available from our very capable developers. Full stock control, account package integration, spreadsheet uploads and all other options can be integrated.

Large hosted
Large hosted solutions are useful for enterprise-level traders who can manage the monthly costs of £100 / $150 to £1,000 / $1,500 and up, in addition to the startup costs.

Other ecommerce solutions

Here are some other options that we don't use but are included for reference.

Small hosted
The most attractive options in small hosted shopping carts are the Ebay and Yahoo store type of offering. This isn't the best choice from an SEO point of view but works well enough when linked in via a standard website. The advantage is that someone else has all the worry and problems with payment processing, security, templating etc.

Client-side
The best-known example is Actinic, which is a good application to use when there are server issues, or when security needs to be very tight (there are few server exploits since you must FTP the flat site pages up to the server). Best for simpler sites with fewer products. Is now a good, search-friendly solution. Runs off a local database, ie one on your PC, such as Access. You build the site on your PC then sync it to the server.

Open-source ecommerce software
We do not offer any open-source solutions currently because although we have worked with several, they don't offer the code quality and search success that we need. Custom builds based on an OSS platform may be different. 

Recently we have been advised that a new player, Magento, offers better quality standards than existing offerings and is also more capable, and we look forward to working with it. If this were true it would be a challenger for Miva, which is our top pick in the mid-market range currently. As stated we look for capability, quality and search-friendliness, and if Magento proves to score well in these areas we have no problem with offering it to clients. It needs to offer valid code and pass accessibility testing as a start, and then we will look closer.