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

[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

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.