Pros/Cons of Shopping Cart on another Domain

[webworld]

Hello,

I hope this is where I should ask about this ... if not, my apologies.

We have several sites three of which have shopping carts (all different). Because of the time factor in updating and changing the carts, we are considering setting up just one cart where we can combine the products in different categories. This cart would be on a separate domain (say) mydomainsupport.com

We intend this site to be a 'flagship' site in the company name, where we will include a full support suite as well as the combined shopping cart. The shopping cart is also our (combined) product catalog.

To access the shopping cart, we would use links to the support site. Whilst it will be obvious the visitor is being taken to another site for the shopping experience, we will make a feature of this on the landing page, stressing improved services and security.

There will also be back links from the shopping cart to the content sites.

To us, this would appear to have several benefits in maintenance and control. It would allow us at any time to make changes to the main content sites without affecting the support site. We believe it will also increase sales.

What we are unsure about is how this would be perceived in SEO terms as well as from a visitor perspective.

We would be grateful for any advice or feedback from the learned members of the WPW community.

Thank you.
Ron S

[inertia]

Is it essential that you have several sites? Why not put it all on one domain name? This is more advantageous with regards to SEO.

[webworld]

Good point .. and thanks for responding. The three sites are well established and have quite different visitor expectations. We would have a difficulty in combining them, which is why we looked at making the 'support' site, including the shopping cart.

In what way(s) would the result of your suggestion be 'more advantageous' for SEO purposes??

Ron S

[inertia]

Well, at the moment you're splitting your efforts between several domains. This means that with regards to marketing, advertising, content building, link building etc. you have to do each several times over.

The main reason for companies to have separate sites is in relation to the sector that they're targeting, e.g. trade and commercial. In this situation the two areas are so far removed from each other that two sites are essential (especially if their trade customers don't need to know!). Is the demographic on each sites visitors the same? If so then put them all on the strongest domain, 301 redirect all unwanted pages to relevant pages on the domain of choice and any pages without a relevant redirect destination should be redirected to a 404 search page.

If the sites really have to be seperate then i dont see any problem with having the shopping cart on one site, just make sure that it is well presented and get some more advice from people who've been in a similar situation.

[scotthai]

Hey WebWorld,
The Pro's of having a shopping cart on another domain is that if you main web entity gets hacked, your credit card numbers stay out of the threat zone. However, it is a challenge (Con) to get continued customer loyalty across domains, since most users actually believe they are arriving at another store to purchase their items. It is my belief that if this is your flagship company and product that you should rather focus on combining the aspects into your main website so that their is cohesion among the actual brands. Like shop.yourdomainname.com, cataloge.yourdomainname.com, subjectx.yourdomainname.com - this would still allow you to have separate web entities, ie relative to the sub-domains, but you could keep customer loyalty. In a buyers market it always comes back to customer loyalty.

I hope this helps, just make sure you are focusing your web efforts in doing the right thing.

Cheers,
Scott Haines
San Francisco Bay Area Website Design and Development (http://www.newfrontproductions.com)

[advancedmerchant]

Hey WebWorld,
The Pro's of having a shopping cart on another domain is that if you main web entity gets hacked, your credit card numbers stay out of the threat zone.
Cheers,
Scott Haines
San Francisco Bay Area Website Design and Development (http://www.newfrontproductions.com)

Still keeping CC numbers on your site? Google "PCI DSS" for more info, but unless you are not only encrypted, but audited/certified, you can lose your business overnight.

[spiderbait]

Because of the time factor in updating and changing the carts, we are considering setting up just one cart where we can combine the products in different categories. This cart would be on a separate domain (say) mydomainsupport.com

To us, this would appear to have several benefits in maintenance and control. It would allow us at any time to make changes to the main content sites without affecting the support site. We believe it will also increase sales.

Hi Ron,

I've done what you're describing and it had some positive and some negative effects. The chief negative was that some rankings were lost due to the loss of the shopping cart pages on the original domains.

I've also solved the same problem with a different solution, which is what I'd recommend for you:

- Have all your sites on the same web hosting account so they can access the same database without special permissions

- Get a wildcard SSL certificate to cover all the sites.

- Install identical carts on all the sites

- Have all the carts access one main database that they'll all share

Design differences in the cart can be accommodated through some custom scripting of the cart's inner workings (such as: if (site a) include sitea.css; if (site b) include siteb.css; and so on).

I think you'll get all the benefits of the consolidated maintenance without any of the risks or hassles of creating a standalone site and maintaining the cross site linking.

Just my 2 cents.
Jade

[inertia]

Hi Ron,

I've done what you're describing and it had some positive and some negative effects. The chief negative was that some rankings were lost due to the loss of the shopping cart pages on the original domains.

I've also solved the same problem with a different solution, which is what I'd recommend for you:

- Have all your sites on the same web hosting account so they can access the same database without special permissions

- Get a wildcard SSL certificate to cover all the sites.

- Install identical carts on all the sites

- Have all the carts access one main database that they'll all share

Design differences in the cart can be accommodated through some custom scripting of the cart's inner workings (such as: if (site a) include sitea.css; if (site b) include siteb.css; and so on).

I think you'll get all the benefits of the consolidated maintenance without any of the risks or hassles of creating a standalone site and maintaining the cross site linking.

Just my 2 cents.
Jade

Great solution if you dont wanna squash them into one site.

[Peter (IMC)]

Better to the shopping cart pages on the individual domains. Without them each site probably has few pages left and that will hurt in the rankings.

A reasonably smart programmer can make it so that all products are managable from the same admin area, where you could specify in which site each product (+ categories) should show up.

[keyon]

My solution was to set up a store and shopping cart on its own site, and then simply link to it from my main content sites. I don't care about SEO at the store domain...it's just a landing page.

I came to this solution after discovering that some web host providers offer better features for content development, while some offer better features for e-commerce. I had trouble finding providers who offer the best of both worlds.

[Peter (IMC)]

My solution was to set up a store and shopping cart on its own site, and then simply link to it from my main content sites. I don't care about SEO at the store domain...it's just a landing page.

I came to this solution after discovering that some web host providers offer better features for content development, while some offer better features for e-commerce. I had trouble finding providers who offer the best of both worlds.

So non of your product and category pages would actually be optimized?

That doesn't make much sense, or perhaps I misunderstood.

[keyon]

So non of your product and category pages would actually be optimized?

That doesn't make much sense, or perhaps I misunderstood.


For my content sites, I went with an open-source, linux server web host - which seems to give me tons of options that other MS-based hosts don't seem to offer. However, setting up and managing open-source shopping carts on these sites was way over the top for me - I'm not a techie.

So what I did instead was set up a Yahoo store for my shopping cart/order processing. The pages at my store have nothing on them except for a product icon and an add-to-cart button...and links going back to my content sites. No need for this site to be indexed in any of the search engines.

From a customer's perspective, I don't think they probably realize (or care) that they are actually leaving one site and going to another. I use the same header and footer in both places.

[mtuba4u]

If you use a standard theme in all pages then a visitor does not usualy notice the change in the address bar.

Keeping things seperate is often an essential part of SEO as it allows / forces you to group similar things with simialar sets of keywords in seperate areas that have no overlap, especialy for those that use advanced search and in clude the NOT option in their bolean search.

If your items are exclusive and are not easily mixed on a site due to incompatabilities with target markets then you need to be aware of the NOT oppertor in experienced hands. I was informed the other day the the use of the NOT operator is increasingly being used because of the large number of results obtained in generic searches.

Having seperate sites will exclude the impact of the NOT operator completely, that is if you remember why you have seperate sites and ensure that the target market / keyword combinations are kept seperate at all times and excluded the relevant key words from the noncompatible sites.

The shoppingcart site should be optimised purely because of the return link value that offers incoming link juice to your info pages that inturn link back to your sales pages. This is an important piece of the SEO puzzel, as all incoming links add value to your site, provided they are within the Search engines Rules.

Having seperate info sites and sales pages is done by many, purely for the purposes of reducing the security risks at the sales pages. How this affects SEO is often debated, but the views are very divergent, and no clear cut solution is offered by anybody.

[webworld]

Thanks everbody for these thought provoking comments. I hadn't expected to get such a response, for which I am appreciative.

I need to think on it for a bit, before reaching a decision, but I am still inclined towards a separate cart site as originally described.

Our products are music related, we have around 20,000 titles and they are set up in the cart in a columnar format. So, there is no individual product optimised. It seems to me at this time that, keeping the same page structure as the info sites will minimise any possible loss in sales due to perceived change of URLS. Maybe, offset by the link values??

However, as said .... I'm thinkin' on it!!

Again, thanks to all contributors. If any one else wants to 'throw their hat in' - please feel free.

Ron S