What is the best format for an e-commerce store?

[johnakjr01]

PHP, Dynamic HTML? ASPX?

[cinnamon9691]

It will depend on your target customer and your knowledge of the platform. There really is no 'best'. I've worked with sites that swear that Flash and totally dynamically driven content is the way to go, and other sites that only use tables. I've seen both types of sites be successful.

As for the basic programming language, you might want to ask your host about what type of language their servers support.

[johnakjr01]

I see, I have been told that a php site would not be well-accepted by google spyders, and that one of the other formats would actually work best.

[adaygrit]

I have been told that a php site would not be well-accepted by google spyders,

Don't worry about using PHP, it will have absolutely no affect on how well Google spiders your site. Here's a few examples to demonstrate why:

First, PHP code is parsed server-side, which means that the PHP code is translated into HTML before it is given to the user's web browser, including Google's search engine spiders. So, when it comes to the page's source code, PHP is identical to a regular HTML page by the time the spider reviews it.

So, the only difference between HTML and PHP to a Google spider would be the web page's file extension. For example, "webpage.html" vs. "webpage.php". Google neither prioritizes ".html" over ".php" nor penalizes pages with the ".php" extension. To test this, simply perform a Google search for anything. Pages with the ".php" extension will be ranked and included appropriately in Google's search results. There's a LOT of PHP web pages out there, and if Google penalized ".php" pages, they'd be leaving quite a large chunk of the internet out of their search results.

However, there is something that can potentially harm your Google rankings, which is a large number of variables in your store URLs. For example, a link ending in: page.php?id=123&product=456&category=789. Spiders don't prefer URLs that contain a lot of variables such as this, and may have trouble indexing them. However, links that contain variables are not specific to PHP; so this isn't a PHP issue, it's a website design issue. (Fun fact: Google spiders used to skip URLs that contained "&id=", but has since reversed that policy.)

I hope this information is helpful!

[marc77]

Generally the programming language your shop is written in does not matter overall. I like Perl and develop the majority of my online software projects with Perl/JavaScript/Ajax - but this is a personal preference of mine.

Others may think different and like PHP (while from a programmer's perspective, Perl is much more powerful, e.g. regular expressions, Unicode support, etc. - but this just as a sidenote (and again, something you can discuss for hours ;-)

But back to topic: You can develop a great software in almost any language and this is something your buying decision should be if you decide for a shopping cart (or whatever): Does it match my requirements, is it easy to install and maintain, can the solution be enhanced in the future, how trustworthy is the software developer ?

[Emilyecho]

Format is not always important. My small online store goes well now because my online store provider fastcommerce.com gives me a good search engine website and many customers can easily find me in big search engines such as google, yahoo, msn, aol.

[QuikShop]

The software is of almost no consequence to your E-commerce shop, search engine optimisation, visitor numbers or conversion rates.

The only issues arise for high volume traffic websites where scripted languages such as PHP (without the 3rd party accelerator) perform worse than compiled technologies like Java and .Net.