Why can’t E commerce software be more SEO friendly?
I cant tell you how many times I have worked with clients whose ecommerce platform is either totally incapable of being optimized for SEO or is severly limited. Heck, in some cases, we can’t even get basic Google analytics tags installed!
I hate to name names but one of the worst systems I have seen to date is Miva Merchant. Several developers I have worked with absolutely hate the software, saying it is ‘a bunch of crap…’ and basically they are not even able to add a basic Google analytics sitewide tag, and asking them to add the commerce tracking tag or even the basic Google conversion tag (which is so so basic) was simply impossible to do!
How do these vendors expect their customers to run ecommerce business using a software platform that doesnt even allow for web analytics and tracking? I have basically had to tell several clients that I couldnt help them, as much as I wanted the business, I cant really conduct online marketing programs if I cant even have analytics in place.
Other clients have come to me with inhouse/homebuilt commerce systems, again with some real fundamental problems like not being able to have customized page titles or meta information for each page! Or using session ID’s in the URLs….
I guess I am just upset that these customers basically are SOL and will likely have to migrate to a new platform..
September 29th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
I am a member of the team who recently bought Miva Merchant back from Miva Corporation and agree with your criticism about our SEO abilities.
As for developers who don’t like our product, that could be that in the past our documentation and support were lacking, but is now one of the single biggest focuses of the company under our new management. My experience is that most developers love our platform once they understand what it’s capable of accomplishing.
We’re highly focused on fixing our SEO problems and there’s documentation to ensure Google Analytics works with Miva Merchant (in fact we just updated our Google Checkout modules to add Google Analytics integration to them).
Please contact us if you need assistance.
September 30th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I have to completely disagree with the statements made in this post. There are several ways to optimize a Miva Merchant site for SEO; several of our clients are now in the top 5 - sometimes even #1 - for fairly common terms like “restaurant equipment” and “educational toys”. We’ve also integrated Google Analytics on Miva Merchant sites, and not just the “basic Google conversion tag”, but even funnel tracking. It sounds like the limitations here are the developers with whom you are working, not the software.
December 5th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I agree with Susan - we have optimized many Miva stores and also integrated Google Analytics with e-commerce tracking and goal conversion (funnel) tracking without a problem and without additional modules. I also think the limitations might be those of the developers not understanding either Miva code or how the Analytics tracking code needs to be implemented into database driven sites.