5 replies to this topic

[gis100]

Web developers from UK or US always have in mind that google is used around the world in one single language: english. Developers of other nacionalities are aware of how foreign people use google in their respective languages: Google is shown in Germany in german, spanish in south-america and Spain... So if you are in germany and you want to buy a "tashe für kamera objektive", my photographic store based in US will never be listed in Germany, even when you offer free international shippments and a killer price. I paid a translator to translate my full website in german, italian, spanish and french but google only finds my main language, not secondaries!.

The actual URL behaviour of Cubecart shares the same URL for each language. The consequences of this URL behaviour (or no behaviour) is terrible for the Cubecart stores pretending to be ranked in google to capture international comerce, because search spiders need a different URL for each language page content.

The only solution is that Cubecart shows each language URL like this in order to feed search spiders with different URLs for each language (this also should apply for product and category URLs):

www.mystore.com ........and for product:......... www.mystore.com/photo-lens-bag
www.mystore.com/es ........and for product:......... www.mystore.com/es/mochila-para-objetivo-fotografico
www.mystore.com/de ........and for product:......... www.mystore.com/de/fotografischen-linse-tasche
www.mystore.com/it ........and for product:......... www.mystore.com/it/borsa-obiettivo-fotografico
www.mystore.com/fr ........and for product:......... www.mystore.com/fr/sac-objectifs-photo

and feed each page with their respective language keywords and metadescription.



Don't ignore that Italy, Germany, Spanish speaking countries and French speaking areas are a market as big in number of people as US and UK together. Forgot to mention asian markets too that they will never find a single cubecart store unless the store uses an asian language as main, even when we paid a translator to do the work. Why do I want a Japanish translation if they can not find me?
That's what I call loosing sales!

I hope Cubecart solve this in their future versions.


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Other features that cubecart needs to have to be equal or beat Zen, CS-Cart or other non-hosted carts:

- Wishlist
- Language Detection (like CS-Cart)
- Previous/Next product navigation (with thumbnails)
- Confirmation box of product added to cart (AJAX looks great, use it!)
- Digital Media support (prelisten, preview, length, media format... then include total of minutes of media purchased in the cart and calculate $/minute of media)
- Events (for ticket sales, not difficult to implement at all, just adding dates fields, etc)
- HTML emails (instead plain text) with template management
- Customers with pending order receive an automatic scheduled email with a call to action
- Automatic Scheduled email some days after order Completion to receive customer satisfaction and invitations to submit reviews
- digital downloads should allow resume mode when using the protected mode
- Customer database password should be shared for the creation of a third party customers forum, integrated with the site
- Store Blog
- Sitemap generator
- Tag box (autogenerated or manual) to feed search spiders with extra pages based on keywords using an URL with the internal cubecart search engine.
- Last visited Products
- Minimum/maximum order quantity per product
- Minimum $ order
- Product Pictures Slideshow
- Promos, promos and promos, Let's boost sales! for example 3x2, buy X get Y free, etc customers love this promos when are well integrated in the store.
- Customizable Product Extra Fields:
- Compare products table based on extra fields

Many of those features are standard with other cards, but in CC4 are only available with 3th party mods that all together costs twice than other carts that already include those features by default.

[cherubix]

The actual URL behaviour of Cubecart shares the same URL for each language.

How have you solved the problem with the search function? I had a confirmation from the cubecart team that the search only works in primary language. Totally useless cart to multilingual shops.
Due to these 2 reasons (search function and SEO) I need to take some actions and can't decide whether to split my shop in 2 separate websites ( luckily I only run my store in 2 languages) or to completely change to another cart?

[cherubix]

Do you know if other carts have the same problems with search function/SEO for multilingual shops?

[gis100]

Do you know if other carts have the same problems with search function/SEO for multilingual shops?

I've been testing CS-Cart and SEO in multiple languages ranks perfectly in google. It's also lovely the language detection, I'm now on a French OS and the page appeared automatically in French.

The only thing why I haven't move to CS-Cart is that I haven't found a mod that allow multiple digital downloads per product. Someone wrotte a mod for this in cubecart and I'm using it in my Cubecart stores. That's the only reason.

[Brivtech]

Languages has come up for discussion before, and older versions of CC did fail to be completely multi-lingual. There were also debates about how best language support could have been achieved.

Personally, I liked the idea of a country code at the beginning of the paths, but I remember when discussing this originally, it was considered too difficult to implement.

Several components of CubeCart like shipping and payment modules didn't offer a language alternative.

I'm hoping that CC5 has now covered this; the language support should cover every single aspect of the system, but I do think further discussion is welcome on how best it be implemented with consideration to SEO.

While I think it's great to have a one-stop website that covers everything, I should also stress that a lot of large companies have regional micro-sites, dedicating their SEO efforts to the different international markets.

The question here is: Do I want micro-sites by geographic region or simply by language? Could there be countries picking up my site that I don't want to ship to that share the same language? If I have German, do I want a load of people in Namibia ordering from me because they picked up the page?

Personally I would be happy having several stores on different microsites (sub-domains) of the same domain. Obviously, it would be great if they could be administered together. Perhaps more could be done with regard to multi-site licensing of the same store that:

1. covers language variants over subdomains (using ISO language code)
2. covers country variants over subdomains (using ISO country code)

What about then language/country variant - Like EN-GB for English Great Britain? And with that, how would I address several countries at once with the same language, like France & Belgium - as neighbours, the shipping probably is the same for me from the UK.

Are subdomains the best option being treated as different domains by search engines, or are there better solutions?

[arames]

I really hope AL could take a look at this post and create a solution to have
www.mystore.com/es ........and for product:......... www.mystore.com/es/mochila-para-objetivo-fotografico
www.mystore.com/de ........and for product:......... www.mystore.com/de/fotografischen-linse-tasche

this would definitely make CubeCart stand out from other carts for sure!