While many shopping carts and online stores have made great leaps in making their carts search engine friendly, they all seem to have room for improvement. Many shopping carts require fairly substantial modification to optimize the product, category and topic pages for the shopping cart. Some shopping carts are much better than others and ASPdotNetStorefront is one of them.

Out of the box, ASPdotNetStorefront is geared to being a a great ecommerce online shopping cart. But where ASPDNSF excels far above the rest is in the ability and scope of search engine optimizing. The level and depth of control over meta tags and their ease of access with ASPDNSF is brilliant. The user can set the page title, keywords and description all from the web administrator page. There is no need to edit core shopping cart files or change your .htaccess files, these featureas are all built into the store front and accessed using only a browser. That makes customization much easier and more effective. Other online shopping carts also have this ability, but you’re usually stuck with a global keyword or description and even then, URL and title descriptions are usually less than perfect.

Every single page is ASPDNSF is customizable for title, keywords and description and it’s so easy to do. If you’ve been working with shopping carts, you know how rare these features can be. After years of working with various programs and applications, I can say, ASPDNSF has the best SEO abilities of any of the shopping carts I have used. No other cart even comes close to this cart when it comes to search engine optimization. You can achieve a similar level in many of the free carts, like Zen Cart and OSCommerce, but they all fall short on ease of use, level of control and the time it takes to edit that you can get with ASPDNSF.

Without proper marketing, your sales will always suffer. ASPDNSF makes search engine marketing as simple as it gets. Of all the features touted by the makers of this online shopping cart, search engine optimization is one of the features they’re under promoting. I know they built the cart around VISA PABP compliance and they designed the cart to easy for your customers to use, but their search engine optimization settings and configurations make it feel like the cart was made to be search engine compatible.

So, if you’re looking for a shopping cart with excellent search engine optimization potential, then you’re going to find your enlightnment with their shopping cart. You can even sign up for a free 30 day trial to play around with the cart and check out just how powerful and customizable a cart they have.

But with this power, comes great responsibility. You can have the best product and still lose to an inferior product with better marketing. It happens all the time (McDonalds, Budweiser, VHS, etc..) Choosing the right cart is an important, but choosing the right words or NOT choosing the wrong words are even more important. You need someone with search engine experience to get the best results from this shopping cart. You need someone that knows how to talk to search engines and turn your product pages into sales. You can set the meta keywords and description for every page, but without the right words, you’re going to miss the potential that this cart provides.

ASPDotNetStorefront is a lot to type out, so hereafter, I will refer to it as ASPDNSF, which is easier to type.

ASPDNSF is another great shopping cart. This cart is used by some big names and it’s used by them for a reason – the cart is great. Out of the box, this cart excels. It has the basics you would expect from an online shopping cart: payment gateways, shipping gateways and so much more. Image handling with ASPDNSF is really good and by far, the best out-of-the-box image management I’ve used. But all these features come at a price, which is currently $1295 for the ‘good’ version. If you want the source, which you will, add an additional $995. Want updates, that will cost another $299. Total price for the store, the source and 1 year of updates: $2,589.00 – yep. Wait, don’t make up your mind just yet, even though that seems like a lot of money, it’s not a bad deal when you consider what you’re getting.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Good

Image management in ASPDNSF is very simple and very robust. Simple and powerful isn’t something you’ll usually find with a shopping cart, but somehow, they manged to make it work. Not only does it work, it works miracles. All those nice mouse-over images you see in online stores are built into this cart. With some carts, you have to manually add in the image function for every item, which is very time consuming and requires a good deal of programming knowledge. And then there’s Zoomify, a fantastic flash image viewer that is a godsend for detailed imaging in shopping carts. It takes a little work to use with each product, but it’s all drag and drop and anyone can use it – no programmer needed.

Another one of the great things about ASPDNSF is PABP compliance. You’ll never appreciate how much this means until you get the subpoena. TJ-Max and Marshals are currently facing a multi million dollar lawsuit thanks to their site’s data being hacked. This storefront was built with security in mind and that’s something that can not be said of many store fronts. Security should be a major concern of all shopping carts, but sadly, it is not. ASPDNSF takes security seriously and is yet another reason they’re one of my favorite shopping carts.

Search engines LOVE ASPDNSF. You won’t find an easier to use search engine method than the one used in this cart. It’s so customizable and simple to use, it shames most other shopping carts. This is a huge positive when it comes to a storefront and something I can not stress enough as being mission critical. Search engine optimization is damned good with ASPDNSF.

Inventory control is nothing short of spectacular. A lot of carts don’t track inventory by size, color and whatever other variants you may have, but ASPDNSF does and it does it very well. It’s also easy to change, update and manage inventory if you have a brick and mortar store. There’s even a third party tool called T-Hub that will integrate the store with QuickBooks POS and that’s something you’re really going to need once the online orders start rolling in.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Not So Good

Product management with ASPDNSF isn’t the best out there, but it’s not the worst either. While adding products and variants are very easy to do, changing prices and availability are not easy. ZenCart and OSCommerce have a very nice indicator for IF a product is published, but this is not the case in ASPDNSF. You will have to manually check on an item’s published status, which can be very time consuming. However, adding variants (size, color, etc.) are much easier to accomplish in ASPDNSF than ZenCart or OSCommerce default installs.

Templates are going to require knowledge in XML and XLS to really get the look you want and even then, without the source code, you’re still going to be at the mercy of the default program. However, with the source, you can do almost anything your programmer can imagine. It’s really powerful, but the power comes at a price – ease of use.

Support for ASPDNSF isn’t the best. You get 30 day support with your purchase, but the support is limited to problems and built-in features. If you want something not in the feature list, you’re going to have to hire someone to make it happen. Their forum, while informative, lacks the user base of ZenCart and OSCommerce and so a lot of the features you may want aren’t addressed and as such, they don’t exist without hiring someone to make your features and that’s not cheap.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Ugly

$$$ it’s going to cost you a fairly substantial amount to get your site where you probably want it to be and that’s something you’re going to have to consider when looking for an online storefront. Without the source, your hands will be tied when it comes to really making your site ‘zing’.

Some features you expect from a storefront don’t exist in ASPDNSF, which is a shame. Being able to filter products is possible, but the method is clumsy and down right confusing to many customers. With the source, you can make your own filtering, but it will cost you more money in programmer fees. Product filtering is a feature many customers expect and you will lose customers from lack of product filtering.

Google Analytics suffer with ASPDNSF. On the feature list, you’ll find Google Analytics as a feature of ASPDNSF. I’ve found the opposite to be true. You can get almost all features to work, but not all. There’s a odd situation where you can use some of Analytic’s features, but not all of them. Depending on the method you use, you can get certain features to work. As it stands, I have every feature of analytics except site searches. I’ve been told this issue is going to be resolved, but I’ve yet to see as resolution to this issue.

Windows hosting. I’m a linux guy, so using a Windows-ISS based host wasn’t something I wanted. Windows hosting costs more than Linux/Apache and lacks some of the features I’ve become used to using. I know, this is a preference issue, but it’s a big change for me and my hosting style and needs.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – What it all means

ASPDNSF is still my favorite storefront, despite its few shortcomings. If you’re looking to sell a few products that don’t have size and color variations, ASPDNSF may not be the best choice for you. But if you’re serious about ecommerce and your shopping cart, ASPDNSF is a bargain. It handles variants, sizes and inventory as good, if not better than any other shopping cart I’ve used and that’s with a default install. You also get a nearly infinite amount of products to add and that something you’re not going to get from many shopping carts. SEO is a breeze with this cart and while there are a few minor issues with SEO, this cart is by far, the easiest to use with SEO.

The cost may be off putting to some, but it’s also a one-time expenditure. A lot of other carts charge per month or even per sale, which to me is ridiculous. In the long run, you’ll be happy with the money you spent on ASPDNSF. It’s going to cost at least the same amount, in programmer fees or time, to get ZenCart and other free carts to act like ASPDNSF.