While at Pubcon, I had a chance to chat with the friendly guys from Mountain Media about their new search engine friendly ecommerce package, Mountain Commerce. I was interested in the product, because truly se friendly commerce packages are pretty difficult to come by. Sure, things are getting a little better out there, but much of it just isn't perfect. So although I was impressed by Mountain Media's sales pitch, I decided to reserve judgment until I could do a little testing of a demo once I got home.
Now that I've been through the demo, I'm still impressed. The feature set is robust, and should satisfy most needs anyone would have of an ecommerce system. But I expected that. What I was really looking for were the SEO aspects of the software, and I dug around until I was satisfied. The URL structure is sound, the pages are set up to have their own unique titles and metas, and the resulting code is nice and clean. (Note: It is possible for a webmaster to muck up the code, but initial output, assuming the webmaster doesn't break the code on his own, is far cleaner than most other programs I've looked at).
All admin functions seemed clear and easy to understand, despite the fact that there were plenty of editorial control features available. All of the standard features you would expect were there, as well as a few goodies that may not be common, including:
- Ability to import and export products
- Built-in phone order management
- 100% UPS integration
- PayPal integration
- Newsletter capability
There's just a whole host of other features, and the Mountain Media team can also be contracted to create specialized, unique features just for you.
But I saw what I needed to see...a good, easy to use, search engine friendly ecommerce package. It is sorely needed.
I don’t get it. Is this something they already have live?
Because I looked at some of the sites they have listed using the carts and they appear to be using a variant of session hashes in the URLs.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me first say that I am employed by Mountain Media and would like to respond to this question from SEFL.
I can’t be sure which stores were viewed here given how many clients we have, so I am going to answer this in two parts:
1. Our website lists several clients that have been around a long, long time. It’s very possible the sites you saw were running in a much older platform than Mountain Commerce 6.0. Older versions of Mountain Commerce had some SEO inadequecies that were addressed in the later versions, especially 6.0 where the whole idea was SEO-friendliness.
2. Mountain Commerce 6.0 will display a session in the URL but ONLY once, after your first click into the site you will see no session ID’s anywhere, just clean URL’s. Now, 2 points about that:
A. When Mountain Commerce 6.0 detects a bot instead of a user, session ID’s are turned off. Bots do not see that initial URL that you might.
B. If you do a site: search of Commerce 6.0 stores (christmasnightinc.com, ejazzlines.com, sarabearbaskets.com, etc) you’ll see all the pages indexed properly. You will NOT see session ID’s indexed or any junky URL’s at all.
I hope this answers your questions. I would be certainly happy to discuss this via email or in person with anyone that has further questions.
Of course, now that I have gotten to meet Donna and enjoy her blog, I will be reading it constantly and I am sure she will pass along any further concerns or questions to me.
Hi Dan,
That’s a pretty thorough answer. Although I don’t necessarily agree with the logic, I do understand it.
Anyway, the sites I found were on this page:
http://www.mountainmedia.com/ecommerce-solutions.cfm
One of them was the Christmas Night, Inc. site. The other was Speed Sports, Etc.
I didn’t just ask the session hash question because of search engines either. I asked because there are users that have a habit of copying/pasting URLs from various sites, and when they hve session hashes, that causes problems.
From a sheer usability standpoint, I personally wouldn’t want to see them there at all. But that’s just me.
You are correct about the potential for users to copy and paste URLs and that is a potential pitfall. That is why Mountain Commerce can easily be configured to use only cookies for session IDs.
We have found that merchants tend to be more interested in supporting users that have cookies disabled than in keeping session IDs out of URLs. We recognize the potential for problems with this, which is why we made it configurable.