PDG Shopping Cart

Atlanta-based PDG Software, Inc. developed the PDG shopping Cart. They have been developing shopping cart products since 1997. Their current offering has many search engine friendly features.

Highlights

The PDG shopping cart is an impressive software offering. It is one of the only search engine friendly shopping carts that you can purchase from the start and not have to rely on hosting from the company offering the cart.

PDG satisfies the SEOShoppingCarts.com requirements for what makes shopping carts great. It has the usual meta-tag and title tag flexibility but also HTML pages, and so on.

This cart also has a long list of "traditional" features from Froogle data feeds to frequent shopper points tracking. The extent of these features demonstrates a true understanding that a shopping cart will not sell itself and that using these tools can help boost business.

If you visit the company's website, you'll note that it barely discusses the search engine friendly features. Have a look at their customer samples and look for the important features as described on the shopping cart comparison page.

Limitations

It should be noted that it may be difficult for beginners to use this cart because of its out-of-the-box status. You may want to get a professional company to build your cart if you are not that familiar with web design and development.

The website structure and related page-naming ability of this cart is somewhat limited. The company's tech support staff can help you with mod re-writes to make the URLs more search engine friendly. However, in order to automate the process to upload products from the back-end (as is the purpose of these shopping cart systems), the website can only have a few specific formats that would be considered optimal. For example, you cannot have www.yourstore.com/category/brand/item-abc.htm.

Rather the product's SKU must be inserted somewhere in the URL which may interfere with some companies' existing systems. Also, hyphens cannot be inserted into the item portion of the web address as indicated above. Due to these and related page/structural issues, this cart may be a little more limited in terms of getting optimal performance out of the cart. Keep in mind that this is just one small-ish problem within a very strong cart offering.

The company does not provide an email address on their website but it does have a submission form and a phone number. We know of at least 2 people who contacted them through the form but never heard back.

Overall

As a stand alone shopping cart solution, this is a very well-rounded package and it is search engine friendly which is a great bonus. Its out-of-box status and the fact that there are no monthly fees (aside from running it on your own server or getting hosting) are sure to please many web developers and business owners.

Visit the site: http://www.pdgsoft.com/

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