Sunshop Shopping Cart Review
A truly search engine friendly shopping cart
I've been promising a Sunshop shopping cart review, particularly since Turnkey Web Tools' php-based Sunshop 4 is a huge enhancement over the earlier excellent versions, and lots of additional little tweaks have been added since the initial release (we've up to version 4.1.5). Let me put it this way — I've just completed two (of three) ecommerce sites utilizing Sunshop 4, and am about to launch into a fourth. While I'm great at kvetching, you'll hear no complaints from me.
Sunshop Installation
If you're familiar with installing web/database applications, Sunshop is a breeze — edit the config file, upload the files and run the web-based install. (My How to install Sunshop post was written for people who are less familiar with installing web apps.)
So far so good, but if I'm going to set up a shopping cart, it ought to look and feel professional and logical. I don't want to work with (or present a possibly not so Web-savvy client with) a vague or strangely organized admin panel. But no fear of what you'll see when you log in to Sunshop, because the admin panel is gorgeous and organized:
On the admin panel home page, among other things, are Flash-based graphs showing current and yearly sales. There are also links (see the blue Transactions panel below) to various reports, including pie charts. Lots of stuff to download. On the Transaction Reports and Transaction Stats pages, we have more Flash-based graphs, calendars, compilations of which products are doing best — tastefully colorful pie charts, even. Very impressive, as these features boost your knowledge of how your site is doing. And what an impressive marketing tool to hand over to a client!
Designing Sunshop Themes
Sunshop 4 comes with at least six really excellent themes (designs). You can use them as is, or choose one as the basis of your custom theme. As well, you can design within the admin panel (a very slick Ajax-y interface) or — my personal preference — you can edit the individual template files on your computer and upload them.
To be honest, I really pushed/begged/pleaded for the ability to edit templates on my machine and upload them, as I find that so much easier than editing in a browser — and the Turnkey guys came through spectacularly. On the right is a small image of the Sunshop templates in Dreamweaver. Just open, edit, save, select and press button — uploaded! I can't tell you how much easier this makes designing a theme.
But, enough of my preferred methods of working. On to …
The Sunshop Store
Sunshop 4 has so many features that I won't be able to cover them all here. But here's the store front of Julien's Auctions — I customized the theme to fit the Julien's website design:
Next, we have a screenshot of a product page from the Corium 21 store. As you can see, the product pages have little "tabs" for product descriptions, Related Products, Reviews and the Tell-A-Friend feature. This image and the one below it show that I've moved the product description out of the tabs:
Mini-Cart — what's in your cart? Next is a product page from Julien's Auctions; in this one, I've highlighted the little "mini-cart" that displays what a customer has added to his/her cart. There is also a currency feature; just install the included plugin (did I mention there are quite a few plugins, including many for Google checkout), press a button to update the currency rates, and there you go. Customers can visit the store and elect to have prices converted to their own currency. Very cool.
View Cart/Checkout
Here's a screenshot of the View Cart page. Notice that I've elected to use a couple of the plugins included with Sunshop:
- the cart displays items that other customers have purchased along with the one in the Cart.
- The Shipping Estimate Calculator, which enables customers to see what their shipping costs will likely be before the checkout sequence.
- By the way, there are more plugins; these are just the ones I've used.
I should also note that Sunshop 4's entire checkout sequence is secure — which starts when you click the Checkout button on the View Cart page.
XHTML/CSS
Okay, let's get down to it: Sunshop 4 uses mostly divs and CSS and is XHTML compliant (assuming you don't err if you're customizing it). This, of course, makes it much easier to work with than fully tables-based designs.
Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart
That out of the way, it's also very search engine friendly. To be honest, I've given a decent amount of input regarding what it might take to make Sunshop search engine friendly — and more so than other "search engine friendly shopping carts" (which may not have been so SEF). The guys at Turnkey Web Tools did all that and more.
Heck, you can even convert the category and product pages to static HTML with word-based URLs based on your product titles. I haven't because I'm in love with the little mini-cart, but I also haven't found any problems with getting pages indexed in search engines — or ranking well.
I noticed a couple of Sunshop customers in the TurnkeyWebTools forums discussing how their Sunshop stores are performing in the search engines. Read jett69 and Pooch (comments #25 and #26).
So, there you have it. Years ago, I'd looked into a dozen or so shopping carts, and installed a couple, and then stopped at Sunshop — I wanted a reasonably easy to work with, client-pleasing, search engine friendly shopping cart that was easy for both customers and site owners to use. Lacking those elements, it doesn't matter to me what features a shopping cart has because it's not workable for me.
I'll say that I've also spent a certain amount of time talking to the kind gents at TWT about features I wanted. When it came time to design Sunshop 4 (which they redid more or less from the bottom up), they threw the doors open, posting an open call for requests and feedback in their forums (the comments thread alone is 15 pages long). They've come through admirably. Kudos to them, and to their software.
TurnkeyWebTools: I've had exceptional help from these guys over a number of years. Although Sunshop is not a free shopping cart, in my opinion, it gives me far more, and far more to work with, than anything else I've seen. I'm pleased to know that, since TWT is a business, they stand behind their products; I'm not just waiting out there for someone to answer a query in a forum.
I highly appreciate the support, both by phone, by email and in the TWT forums, on those increasingly rare occasions when I had a question. Heck, check their forums — they'll even step in and have a look at your server if you can't sort things out yourself.
So, in closing, I hope this review is helpful. TurnkeyWebTools' Sunshop 4 shopping cart is one of the tools in my competitive toolbox. If you're interested, go check out the online demo. :)
Kudos, and thanks, guys.
22 Comments to "Sunshop Shopping Cart Review"
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Dansko says:
Comment posted on 05/27/09 @ 2:49 am
Looks good, but never understand why Search Engines loves static htm extensions than php or asp extensions.
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 05/27/09 @ 3:35 am
I don't think it's so much a matter of .html versus .php or .asp — it's really about dynamic URLs. Back in the '90's, the major search engines (of which Google was not one) had problems with URLs containing question marks, which is a pretty normal scenario for dynamic URLs. Last I read of Google on the issue (which was a while ago), they liked three or less data pairs.
I haven't had any problems with Sunshop's dynamic URLs — either getting the pages into search engines, or getting them to rank well.
Does that help?
Dansko says:
Comment posted on 05/27/09 @ 3:46 am
Thanks Diane. I always overwrite dynamic URLs with ? in it with static / or .htm using htaccess, as I had some problems with rankings dynamic URLs a few years back.
Joey says:
Comment posted on 07/4/09 @ 1:37 pm
Looks good – how does it compare to Cubecart reliability/feature-wise?
I've always tried to use mod_rewrite where possible with database driven sites – think Google mainly prefers it as it likes seeing the keyword within the url rather than just a product ID.
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 07/12/09 @ 9:00 pm
I haven't tried Cubecart, Joey. They do have Sunshop demos (see the orange navbar).
I'm a fan of mod_rewrite, too, although I haven't worked it out for Sunshop. Mainly, we haven't had problems getting Sunshop pages ranked in Google or other search engines.
Brian says:
Comment posted on 08/31/09 @ 9:18 pm
Did TWT mention if they plan to add a one page checkout option anytime soon? We\'ve seen this option on a lot of other carts. Not a deal killer for us because we love the software anyway.
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 08/31/09 @ 9:20 pm
Hi, Brian. I don't know, although I'd like to see a one-page checkout as well. I'm assuming that you mean registering, inputting credit card info and choosing shipping options all on one page. That would be terrific.
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 08/31/09 @ 9:24 pm
By the way, love your site. I just added it to the little one-page directory on our organic food site. :)
Brian says:
Comment posted on 09/20/09 @ 7:41 pm
Hi Diane,
I'm having trouble installing Sunshop on my server because I'm developing it while my existing shop remains live. Do you know of a workaround to allow me to work on the new site while the other remains live?
Thanks
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 09/20/09 @ 7:47 pm
I was going to say no, but this might help:
Installing on a test server without a license
Vaneli says:
Comment posted on 09/21/09 @ 11:49 pm
Thank you for the test server link Diane. I was looking for it.
Ryan Kaufman says:
Comment posted on 10/9/09 @ 6:25 pm
Thanks for the review on this. I think you have sold me on it now, plus i love that there is no monthly fee.
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 10/10/09 @ 12:09 am
I like the lack of monthly fee, too, along with fact that everything's on your own server where you can always download a "dump" of your database.
I also like the fact that TurnkeyWebTools updates their software with new features now and then. If your one-year license has run out (during which time you get free support and the ability to download new versions), then you just pay the renewal fee and you're good to go.
I guess I should also state that I haven't been paid for these reviews (actually, I've never been paid for a review); I'm just a fan.
Linda Bookhardt says:
Comment posted on 10/15/09 @ 11:08 am
Diane,
Can you put a wordpress blog on sunshop. I have been reading about wordpress but my mind does not wrap around how it would end up in sunshop. I know how to install it on my hosting server through cpanel but do not see the connection? Have you had any experience with this?
Thanks for you help?
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 10/15/09 @ 11:19 am
> Can you put a wordpress blog on sunshop …
Actually, that's way too much work. Websites are just a bunch of pages held together (from the user's perspective) by links to the various pages.
So … you'd install Sunshop, and you'd install WordPress, and use your menu of links to link to both, like:
Home
Shop
Blog
Does that make sense?
Linda Bookhardt says:
Comment posted on 10/16/09 @ 6:53 am
I'm not sure. You know they say blogs draw traffic to your website and I am trying to keep my SEO up. Here is how my junior brain is looking at this. Sunshop page has a tab at the top titled blog. As I sell discontinued and rare cosmetics, I could blog about that and send links to not only my website but to others. I am hosted and have fantastico which has wordpress. In my mind I don't know how the two would connect. If you installed wordpress on my account, how would I get it on to Sunshop.
Or… should I. What do you mean by too much work. I know you have vast experience with websites so I am confused about how all of this fits together.
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 10/16/09 @ 10:45 am
Okay. Originally, you asked how to put a Wordpress blog "on" Sunshop, which I took to mean "within" Sunshop. My answer was that you don't have to merge the two to put them on a website; that is, you don't have to combine the software (WordPress and Sunshop). That's what I meant by "a lot of work".
Essentially, you have Sunshop as the home page of your site (what people land on when they go to yoursite.com).
Then you can put WordPress in a subdirectory, say /blog.
Then, both WordPress and Sunshop have editable templates, so you just add links from Sunshop to the blog, and from the blog to Sunshop. That ties the two together.
It's fairly easy if you know what you're doing and can write a bit of code, but otherwise, it can be pretty confusing.
Personally, I'm not crazy about using Fantastico to install anything, because that can create problems down the line when you want to upgrade. Manual installation is my recommendation.
Linda Bookhardt says:
Comment posted on 10/20/09 @ 8:39 am
That is good to know about manual install of WordPress. Would I be creating a template page in Sunshop with a link? How would people blog in it? Would the blogged material automatically show up on the template page. I have never blogged so that would probably help with the problem. I apologize for being so ignorant. I can pretty well follow the code that is in different examples and figure out how to use it to my advantage. I certainly could not take a blank page and write code though.
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 10/20/09 @ 9:17 am
No, you'd just add a link to the blog in the Sunshop template, and add a link to sunshop in the blog template.
StevenH says:
Comment posted on 10/25/09 @ 9:33 pm
Hi Diane,
I don't know if you remember me. Is
"Simplicity can be extraordinary in a world built by people who think all end users are programmers too "
one of your all time favorite quotes? :)
Still running SS4.latest.greatest and probably like it more than when I first posted in here over 2 years ago. Anyway, just wanted to stop by and say HI!
cheers
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 10/25/09 @ 10:29 pm
Yep. I remember it, on the first Sunshop review.
Glad you're doing well. :)
Sunshop Shopping Cart Review says:
Pingback posted on 02/24/10 @ 12:39 am
[...] as possible, I thought I'd do a review. This was a review of Sunshop 3.x — please go to my Sunshop 4 Review [...]