Now it seems like you’re grasping for anything.
We’re not discussing Avactis, where the SEO-structure can be changed to write better seo, but Prestashop.
Hello Eplebiten,
[quote name=‘eplebiten’]Now it seems like you’re grasping for anything.
We’re not discussing Avactis, where the SEO-structure can be changed to write better seo, but Prestashop.[/QUOTE]
Sorry, but I believe I read in your post the name of Avactis:
[quote name=‘eplebiten’][…]Avactis […] is […] the best one for my use.[/QUOTE]
*****
[quote name=‘eplebiten’]
We’re not discussing Avactis, where the SEO-structure can be changed to write better seo, but Prestashop.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://demo.avactis.com/1.9.1/info/pid/3.html[/url]
How to add product name in URL?
[url]https://demo.avactis.com/1.9.1/avactis-system/admin/catalog_editproduct.php?pid3.html[/url]
[QUOTE]System identifier for categories. Default value is pid. This ID may be changed but cannot be left blank.[/QUOTE]
Source: [url]https://demo.avactis.com/1.9.1/avactis-system/admin/popup_window.php?page_view=MR_Settings×tamp=1278694653[/url]
The same with PrestaShop about SEO urls:
It’s a big pain to try to remove the number in the begining of URL:
/[COLOR="Red"][B]1[/B][/COLOR]-ipod-nano.html
Source: [url]http://www.prestashop.com/demo/musique-ipods/1-ipod-nano.html[/url]
Please, it’s seems to me than with CS-Cart SEO urls are a little bit easier a lot more powerful and cleaner and better than Avactis or PrestaShop 
Lee Li Pop
I am using Avactis and at the moment it’s my favourite, and that’s what I wrote. This whole thread is about Prestashop vs CSC, so starting to argue about another cart system would be considered as wasting peoples time.
I’m starting to suspect you of beeing too blind of any cons of CSC, and if so there will be no point in any further discussion.
Hello Eplebiten,
I understand that is a PrestaShop post. However, before to shoot on CS-Cart, you could begin to answer my three questions:
1 - How to add product name in the Avactis URL?
2 - How to remove number in the PrestaShop URL?
3 - It seems to me that a good URL structure, like CS-Cart can do it automaticaly without any parasite character, is one of the basis of good manners of SEO, right?
Lee Li Pop
I would like to add something about Prestashop that will prevent me from ever using or supporting it.
Below is a quote from their system requirements and it actually tells you a great deal about what to expect from these developers and their willingness to adapt to changes.
[url]http://www.prestashop.com/en/downloads/[/url]
[quote]System requirements:
* - Linux, Unix, or Windows
* - Web Server (Apache 1.3 or later, IIS 6 or later)
* - PHP 5.0* or later
* - MySQL 5** or later
- Some PHP 5 versions are bugged and prevent PrestaShop from working correctly:
-
- PHP 5.2.1 (authentication is impossible)
- PHP 5.2.1 (authentication is impossible)
-
- PHP 5.2.6 (authentication is impossible under 64bits servers)
- PHP 5.2.6 (authentication is impossible under 64bits servers)
-
- PHP 5.2.9 (image management/upload broken)
- PHP 5.2.9 (image management/upload broken)
-
- PHP < 5.2 (invalid date timezone)
** PrestaShop is working from MySQL 4.1.14 to 5.0 too but some features are not working (e.g., product duplication) or have strange behaviors[/quote]
Notice the constant complaints about buggy PHP versions preventing some functions from working. This is poor programming and not the foundation it is built on. Every worthy developer knows that changes are inevitable and you must adapt to them as they come. These guys appear to be unwilling to do so and that is going to be a very big problem soon…
All quality hosting companies are now waiting for PHP developers to modify their products to be compatible to the now available PHP 5.3+ before they upgrade their servers to that version. We are nearly all still using PHP 5.2.13 because there are a bunch of newly depreciated functions in PHP 5.3 and many current scripts will be broken unless these functions are rewritten.
I’ve looked through the coding of Prestashops newest beta and it still contains some of these depreciated functions such as eregi and split so I guess they will now need to add another line to that quote above that PHP 5.3 is also buggy.
I have nothing against open source developers and have been one myself for years but, nearly all commercial products incorporate much better quality control and support. They will also certainly adapt to changes because they have to if they wish to stay in business.
My 2 cents
- PHP < 5.2 (invalid date timezone)
-
[quote name=‘S-Combs’]I would like to add something about Prestashop that will prevent me from ever using or supporting it.
Below is a quote from their system requirements and it actually tells you a great deal about what to expect from these developers and their willingness to adapt to changes.
[url]http://www.prestashop.com/en/downloads/[/url]
Notice the constant complaints about buggy PHP versions preventing some functions from working. This is poor programming and not the foundation it is built on. Every worthy developer knows that changes are inevitable and you must adapt to them as they come. These guys appear to be unwilling to do so and that is going to be a very big problem soon…
All quality hosting companies are now waiting for PHP developers to modify their products to be compatible to the now available PHP 5.3+ before they upgrade their servers to that version. We are nearly all still using PHP 5.2.13 because there are a bunch of newly depreciated functions in PHP 5.3 and many current scripts will be broken unless these functions are rewritten.
I’ve looked through the coding of Prestashops newest beta and it still contains some of these depreciated functions such as eregi and split so I guess they will now need to add another line to that quote above that PHP 5.3 is also buggy.
I have nothing against open source developers and have been one myself for years but, nearly all commercial products incorporate much better quality control and support. They will also certainly adapt to changes because they have to if they wish to stay in business.
My 2 cents[/QUOTE]
Are you trying to tell me cscart isnt buggy? There’s a whole forum that would shoot you down straight away.
[quote name=‘S-Combs’]I would like to add something about Prestashop that will prevent me from ever using or supporting it.
[/quote]
[quote name=‘mrfoameruk’]Are you trying to tell me cscart isnt buggy? There’s a whole forum that would shoot you down straight away.[/quote]
Most likely not 
CS-Carts fix for deprecated functions 
```php
/*
- PHP options
*/
// Disable notices displaying
error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);
if (version_compare(PHP_VERSION, ‘5.3.0’, ‘>=’)) {
error_reporting(error_reporting() & ~E_DEPRECATED);
} ```
Could go on and on and argue…Lee Li is right… I ran presta for a year, and doesnt match CS in any areas if you have product options (or variants) as Presta calls them.
yes it may suit some but…CSC all the way for me.
John
There is good and bad to both. Prestashop is a better converting cart IMO. My sales dropped about 15% when I moved from presta to cs-cart. CS-Cart has the better shipping/carrier functionality and I was able to do FedEx label printing with shippingkit's 3rd part solution for CS-cart. This was a huge benefit for our fulfillment. CS-Cart also comes with several nice features but the overall negative reviews go to performance of CS-Cart. The cart is generally thought of as SLOW. Prestashop is very fast. So again, there is good and bad. The best thing to do is to test each cart and see which performs better for your needs. I think Prestashop for the long haul is gaining more steam. Just trying to be objective here. You are on a CS-Cart forum so expect a lot of bias. LOL
[quote name=‘Infidels Inc.’ timestamp=‘1311116278’ post=‘117710’]
Hi all - I’ve been using Prestashop 1.3.6 for about a year or so and was pretty easy to get going. Pulled it down, setup the DB, used the basic modules (all I needed) that came with it and found a free theme to run with it so it’s been a good solution for me for a while. Now that Prestashop is updating (e.g. 1.4.x) to live shipping and other stuff - I initially tried to do an update to my shop which failed for some reason and was giving ‘tax’ errors and other stuff that (being a relative beginner) couldn’t find out how to fix so I rolled back to 1.3.6 - which again, runs like a champ because it’s simple to use and I don’t require tons of plugins or outside functionality with modules.
I’m in the process of moving to CS-Cart just haven’t pulled the trigger - I think my main reason is that again I have an easy store - but I found that with Prestashop they tend to update the version almost every month or so - which is good and bad. Good that they’re fixing errors/bugs - bad that you can never keep your custom theme or modules updated unless you can work with the developer… so unless you want to spend hours trying to figure it out, you’re stuck essentially with the same version. I like the idea that CS-Cart can be updated automatically and they do (even though they have bugs) work on those and seem to stretch out the updates.
I understand that prestashop’s auto-update is getting better, but just looking for a long-term partner that doesn’t post updates every 30 days 
I guess in closing - I don’t really have any heartaches with Prestashop, just looking for something with some update schedule/stability and CSS editing that may be easier to learn.
[/quote]
Yikes…be careful here. PM me if you want more information. I did the same thing you did…think it over.
Why is it folks feel compelled to update their stores when an update is available?
If you are running a commercial operation (and not a hobby) and the current version is offerring you all the features you want and need, why would you consider upgrading at all. I.e. “If it aint' broke, don't fix it.”
You can turn the notifications off in the database and just merrily go along until you absolutely have to upgrade for some reason or another and then you just have to click on the upgrade center and away you go.
I'd like to see cs-cart rotate their upgrades. It used to work out that even numbered versions were primarily new features and odd-numbered versions were primarily bugfixes (it wasn't intentional, it just worked out that way). I'd like to see that become a policy somehow so that every other release (or every 3rd release) is a bugfix only release. I.e. 2.2.4 fixed several problems and did not inject any new functionality that I'm aware of (though there was lots of internal restructuring in preperation for 3.0, but nothing one would call significant new features). It was nice…
[quote name='Ion_Cannon' timestamp='1325273218' post='128706']There is good and bad to both. Prestashop is a better converting cart IMO. [/quote]
Good to hear your experience and your honest opinion. I hope cs-cart will improve.
My question will be if the higher converting rate (HCR) is because the cart generates more traffic?
-Is the higher convertion rate compared with the same amount of visitors?
-Could be the popularity of the cart (thousand of users) make it more SEO appealing?
-Is really the page speed an issue, instead of content, regarding a visitor buying a product?
I guess here, will be good to hear from some experiencing the opposite, mean HCR and high speed on cs-cart.
Regards,
A conversion rate is simply that; a rate. I.e. if I have 10 visitors and 2 of them buy something I have a 20% conversion rate. If I have 100 visitors and 2 of them buy, I have a 2% conversion rate.
The conversion rate is not related to SEO in any way, shape or form. It is the rate at which visitors actually end up purchasing something after they've arrived at the store.
So it's all about content, pricing, ease of navigation, speed and simplicity. I.e. the SEO is behind you and now the visitor is shopping on your site. However, once there, total cost is probably the most significant item. Many people will tolerate slowness to save pennies on the total cost of an item (item cost plus shipping). But my experience shows that if they don't feel the site is secure or that the checkout process is too cumbersome, they are gone in seconds.
Number of visitors is directly related to SEO assuming most traffic comes from search engines (organic, not paid search) versus external links.
Note also that many merchants present their products in different ways and a shopping cart either makes this easier for them to do it in the way they want or it doesn't. There are certain characteristics of a cart that are independent of skins, colors, layout. These business processes can be confusing or have too many steps, etc. This is probably the major difference between carts. For example, having the add to cart pop-up come up and before the new user can really see what it says, it disappears. That could put some people off.
Every time you start adding features you change those characterisics of the cart in subtle ways and after you've introduced 100 new features, the cart is quite different (consumer view) than it was when you started.
Merchant choices is also a huge factor. Going to someone's home page of their store where they list 100 products not only makes it slow to load, but makes it very hard for me to find what I'm looking for. But the person who has a nice search capability that yields good results or who has their products structure into a few (not an overwhelming number) categories will also show bettter in my opinion.
All of this comes down to useability. Some of that is affected by the cart and some by merchant choices and some by the nature of the products…
As usual, this is just my two cents since we seem to think there's always one thing we can do that will make “the big difference”. But that is rarely true.
I'm currently testing both of these.
Cs-cart seems like just what I need, but all this talk of it being slow and what not has me a bit concerned. I've been trying all the tweeks to htaccess, gzip, jsmart and more to see what happens. So far I only added a few items and it loads 1 sec slower than my old osc store that has 6000 products in it and way more product photos and stuff (including two animated banners) on the front page. Old site gets B's on Gtmetrix, cs-cart getting C's…same dedicated server as well. It's a bit frustrating because I want to go with something and get it over with.
Prestashop has a boatload of great reports and stuff, but the admin area looks like chaos. Just beginning testing on it. I hope their forums are good. Great thing about osc was you could always get an answer and help with code for anything. Seems like a lot of unanswered posts in this forum…another concern.
Hi there!
You should easily get a B with a cs-cart shop. Only thing you really have to do to get cs-cart faster on customer side (admin side is always slower since this is all dynamic) is move to cache bankend system SQlite (do this in config.local.php) and install smartoptimizer, which should also take care of gzip and all that. It's a 2 minute job installing it.
If you, on top of that, run google mod_pagespeed on your server, you will get really high scores. I have a cs-cart store scoring between 93 and 95 on google pagespeed.
About things not being answered here on the forum: well, there are some things of course, but most questions have been answered a lot of times already so some of us tend to just skip those questions because it gets tiring: all they have to do to find the answer is do a little search or look in the knowledge base: http://kb2.cs-cart.com/
Tip: also search in google like this: cs-cart “your problem here” , which sometimes works better then the search in the forum.
Also, this is a forum for users. Nobody here gets paid to answer questions. Still I think there are some people who really help out and when I came on board about 1,5 years ago, lots of people helped me… some even went into my server and fixed things for me. And now I'm more experienced: I have done the same for some new people. Without their help I would never have been able to setup the 3 shops I'm running now.
More tips on speed, see my post here: [url=“Thanks everyone for your help, I am launched! - General Questions - CS-Cart Community Forums”]Thanks everyone for your help, I am launched! - General Questions - CS-Cart Community Forums
Good luck with everything!
[quote name='Flow' timestamp='1327328013' post='129777']
Hi there!
You should easily get a B with a cs-cart shop. Only thing you really have to do to get cs-cart faster on customer side (admin side is always slower since this is all dynamic) is move to cache bankend system SQlite (do this in config.local.php) and install smartoptimizer, which should also take care of gzip and all that. It's a 2 minute job installing it.
If you, on top of that, run google mod_pagespeed on your server, you will get really high scores. I have a cs-cart store scoring between 93 and 95 on google pagespeed.
[/quote]
Thanks for the reply! Actually, I'm an obsessive and tireless worker when it comes to all this shop stuff, however, haven't had any formal training in php or css. What I do know is self taught, though I have had training in c++ and other stuff. Anyway, I've been resting for years with my current shop, so I sort of have to re-learn a lot of this stuff. I've tried repeatedly to get smartoptimzer to work, but it looks like the page loses it's formatting and everything is on the left side of hte screen. I've tried everything I could find about it on these forums (including deleting so htacces folder, copying store htacces folder to there, etc.). Weird thing is, jsmart (the older verson of smartoptimizer) works fine. I have gzip enabled and I've done some of the other tweaks found in the forums. I haven't done the Sqlite thing though, I'll investigate this further and see if I can implement it. Wish I could get SO and this working as you say.
After all this I've done so far, my page load times aren't bad anyway, just weird that the scores aren't what some people are getting. My front page loads in less than 2 sec. I have about 20 items loaded, and I'm only testing with the free version (so missing many addons). I must say that the more I dig into cs-cart the more I'm loving it. The block thing and the abilitiy to customize a lot of things is great. I don't even really want to mess with prestashop at this point. I just discovered all the options in reports last night, very cool. Seems like “sales by manufacturer” is missing though or did I just miss it. Tons of options, but I could not find how to make a list of sales by manufacturer or top ten manufacturers or something like that. Anyone do this?
I'm currently seeing if I can tweak the css to my liking by adding graphics to block headers and what not. Or maybe I'll just buy a template, haven't found any so far that really do it for me though.
After spending the entire weeking in cs-cart I think I'm about 95% sold. Still just a few more things to test out.
Another question…anyone have an cart issues directly related to this htaccess tweaking? Like things disappearing from the cart, etc. Are there certain thigns to avoid here?
Prestashop could be a little faster right now, but will be in future versions as it brings more features?
Some cs-cart owners moved to VPS because shared hosting are not appropiate for this kind of rich featured carts. But the same goes for magento, opencart etc, just check the live shops on their forum. Once they install more addons, plugins, the cart gets slow and they need VPS.
My advice (as to any of my customers) will be start with a good shared host (for me hawkhost) and move up as traffic increase. If you wanna stay in shared, then optimize images, content, blocks, etc, make it lighter as possible.
[quote name='colortone' timestamp='1327354935' post='129800']
Prestashop could be a little faster right now, but will be in future versions as it brings more features?
Some cs-cart owners moved to VPS because shared hosting are not appropiate for this kind of rich featured carts. But the same goes for magento, opencart etc, just check the live shops on their forum. Once they install more addons, plugins, the cart gets slow and they need VPS.
My advice (as to any of my customers) will be start with a good shared host (for me hawkhost) and move up as traffic increase. If you wanna stay in shared, then optimize images, content, blocks, etc, make it lighter as possible.
[/quote]
I'm on a dedicated server that has VPS software that I have divided up serving 3 different sites of my own. My store site is the only one that has any kind of traffice worth mentioning. I'm actually planning to build a new server box of my own though and have it located at a local server biz. Safe my some money and have a faster updated machine.
Looks like cs-cart has most things I want and with the addition of about 6 or 7 addons it's just about everything I want. The extra stuff I'd probably have to have custom code work done (like ability to create a newsletter with a couple clicks containing latest 30 or so new products listed with links like Pinnacle cart does). Reports by manufacturer and a few others. I wonder if there's a way to implement the old Who's Online thing from Oscommerce, where you can monitor store traffice live, see what ip address is connected to site and what's in their carts, in anything.
Glad you're liking it so far. Yes, cs-cart has it's quirks but it's really a nice little program.
The who's online is actually already there, on the bottom you can see how many people are online, just click on it.
If you want me to have a quick look at you SO install, just let me know… (not that i am the expert, but i have got it working on 3 shops).
[quote name='Flow' timestamp='1327407229' post='129836']
Glad you're liking it so far. Yes, cs-cart has it's quirks but it's really a nice little program.
The who's online is actually already there, on the bottom you can see how many people are online, just click on it.
If you want me to have a quick look at you SO install, just let me know… (not that i am the expert, but i have got it working on 3 shops).
[/quote]
Oh I'm testing with the free version, I just checked out the full version demo for what you mentioned…perfect! Thanks for the enlightenment!