Monster Commerce Review
The Monster Commerce shopping cart and e-commerce system is apparently used by thousands of businesses around the world, and it’s not surprising. This illinois-based web development company is one of the largest such businesses in North America, employing dozens of people. They offer a turnkey operation for a monthly fee.
Highlights
Monster Commerce lives up to its name. This e-commerce shopping cart system is incredibly feature-rich. As with some other systems discussed on this website, you do not need to have knowledge of HTML or any software to build the store.
If you choose to build the cart using ASP, the ASP pages are search engine friendly, can get spidered and indexed, and can potentially achieve decent rankings in the search engines.
The company offers several search engine friendly features such as modifications to alt tags and the addition of breadcrumbs. Creating custom title tags may be limited.
To use the Monster Commerce system, log into the admin section which is web-based and provides both shopping cart, administrative functions and publishing capabilities. There is no direct FTP access. However, there is a file manager that is part of the admin back end that provides file transfer functions.
There is one template for the entire site with the middle of the page being flexible for changes (most shopping carts work that way and it’s fine).
Limitations
This product might be intimidating for people who get overwhelmed with features.
Monster commerce product listings do not provide the product name in the URL. They have the facility to create and publish search engine friendly HTML catalog pages that do provide the product name in the URL but this is an extra step that offers limited flexibility.
If you want an HTML catalog you must set it to “on.” Pages are named after the product pages.
The HTML version of the product listings is different from the rest of the site. The company claims that this will “minimize the possibility of a ‘duplicate contect’ penalty being assessed.” This ignores the idea of simply creating straight HTML pages from the start, avoiding the hassle of having second pages in the first place. Several other search engine friendly shopping carts do exactly that. It is possible that their system is too complex to make that type of instant change without major programming adjustments.
The HTML page is entirely based on the exact product name (with dashes between the words if the product name has multiple words) that was listed in the main website. You cannot name it whatever you want. Once you create the HTML section, you have to create a link to it to get spidered. This is somewhat awkward.
The lack of direct page naming control can be a big problem, making it more difficult to get targeted pages ranking high in the search engines.
Overall
Monster Commerce is worth looking into as a total web development package. The company does a great job of covering many important bases for both the new online merchant or established companies. While it has SEO advantages among its numerous features, it is still partially limited.
Visit the site: http://www.monstercommerce.com/
What is the relationship between Network Solutions and Monster Commerce?
They are one and the same. Has been operating as Network Solutions for a number of years. Looks like this review is dated . . .?