Merchant Metrix Shopping Cart Review
Note: The Merchant Metrix shopping cart was formerly known as the Apple Pie shopping cart. (Reviewed in 2006).
Apple Pie shopping cart was developed by Lee Roberts, a web designer with many years of experience. This cart was one of the first shopping carts on the market that were designed for search engine spidering.
Highlights
Using this cart, the entire website will be search engine friendly, not just a search engine friendly front end that connects to an unspiderable back-end. That alone is a highly impressive feature of this shopping cart.
The test run of the Apple Pie shopping cart is personal (done live by appointment) and users can see that the system is fairly easy to learn and navigate.
This cart was developed to be hosted with Apple Pie and all updates are made through the content management system. You cannot download and install the software supporting this cart. This is true with many of the search friendly options. To find out more, visit the comparison chart.
After several updates, this shopping cart now boasts a number of search-engine friendly features. It allows users to modify many aspects of the site such as title tags, meta tags, breadcrumbs, and so on. The pages are dynamically generated in HTML format meaning that the search engine spiders should see each page as a static one.
There is a built in links-management system which may prove useful for those looking for link exchanges.
Several versions of Apple Pie shopping cart have come out, with users getting free upgrades. The company also offers several useful features such as coupon codes for marketing, an affiliate program, and very easy to use WYSIWYG editor. It is also adaptable for use with Dreamweaver or Frontpage.
Limitations
There is no FTP client access to the site. All changes must be made through the back-end. Also, file names in directories must include a word at the end. For example, http://www.yourwebsite.com/products/page1.html (there must be something on the end such as “page1.html”).
Overall
Apple Pie shopping cart is worth looking into. It offers many features that are clearly search engine friendly.
Visit the site: http://www.applepiecart.com/