Ecommerce Platforms: an SEO’s nemesis?
God-bastard-dammit. Another day, another client. Another website that “can’t be changed”. Another calamitous drop in rankings caused by a weakness in site architecture and a lack of support for content delivery.
I have a drink of tea and sigh. It’s another e-commerce platform.
On paper, a platform offers something great: the opportunity to roll out a fully functional e-commerce store in as simple and cost effective a way as possible. The payment and admin systems have all been developed prior to the signing of a contract and the cost base for future development is split across many clients (and in truth will be borne mainly by the biggest clients then rolled out as a free or cheap extra to everyone else as it gets worked into the code base).
For new entrants into a market, it is a beguiling proposition. A platform will often work out cheaper in development costs and is quicker to bring online. Sometimes lots of the sticky stuff – payment gateways, stock control and logistics integration – comes as part of the bundle as optional modules and so the ease and rapidity of deployment looks like a no brainer compared to the effort required to spec out and oversee a bespoke build. Especially for businesses new to the internet.
But strategically, a shared ecoms platform is a poor choice. Here’s the cynic’s view in graphic form. Long, weary rant after the jump 🙂

The SEO Perspective
There is almost no site in existence that couldn’t do with a little more work on the SEO front. Sometimes that’s because of the varying preferences of different SEOs (“you like subdomains, I like folders” etc) but often there are a million small ways to make enhancements to site and no SEO will see them all.
But what happens when the site isn’t strictly your own property? On a platform, any change made to one site can potentially affect dozens of other sites because the heart of a platform is a shared code base.
Requesting simple, performance-enhancing things like getting Javascript onto a file on a subdomain turns into a political quagmire, because if they do it for you then they’ll have to do it for everyone else. The way out of this trap for them is to quote an extortionate amount to either put you off, or to subsidise the work across all clients. So it was that a client was quoted a full day rate for moving a couple of CSS files.
Another client – on a different platform – cannot have unique content at category level. It “has to” spill across the pagination and every so often we’ll find it skulking on a product page or another part of the site where no-one was expecting it due to the tortuous internal logic of the platform.
For reasons that seem obscure, it is eventually decided that rel canonical can be implemented. Personally I still harbour doubts about the solution and the execution – especially when a couple of keywords continue to drop. But hey – it’s a platform and this is what they’ve got.
Another client. Massive problem. They want to re-organise their categorisation and move some stuff down into sub-categories. The SEO checklist is pretty simple and reads thus:
- 301 old pages to new ones
- Page titles, content and meta descriptions to be unique at sub category level
Neither of these things is deemed possible. I mean… WTF? Not even page titles?
You and I both know that the change is entirely possible – it’s just another database call. It’s just the platform developers don’t want to have to figure out a way of doing it because they’ll have to (all together now) give it to everyone. And my client is just one of many. While they are a big name in their own right, it’s fair to say that others on the platform are even bigger.
From the platform’s point of view, the importance attached to this one minor change for one client among many is going to be pretty low. From the client’s point of view, making these category changes could have massive negative effects. The business strategy, SEO and the supporting technology should all be pulling in the same direction.
Instead, we are forced into just giving the client unpalatable advice that says: “you can’t do what you want to do without a negative knock-on for SEO”. Which is a lousy message to deliver and doesn’t reflect well on anybody and leaves the client in no-man’s land, trying to weigh up a decision that shouldn’t even exist.
Non-SEO Matters
While SEO is my primary beef, I also worry about shared platforms from other perspectives.
Roll-out
We quoted for web development work and had to drop out of the running because we couldn’t commit to meeting the deployment date. The client went with a platform because – according to theory – you just stick a front end on, fill the database and you’re good to go. In fact, the site was launched 8 weeks late!
By the sheerest coincidence we’re in preliminary talks with a company who launched on the same platform. Their website too came in 8 weeks behind schedule. Go figure.
The “quick deployment” idea is often a chimaera. The site still needs designing. Despite the one-size-fits-all claim, there will be customisations. You are just one client among many and so can’t have that much sway on development timetables if a bigger customer comes banging on their door with demands for changes.
While that might be equally true for bespoke builds, an agency will inherently have more flexibility than a platform – and the logic of cashflow means that a big chunk of upfront development for a new client should take priority over tinkering for existing clients, giving you much more clout.
The Long Term
I once was in discussion with a platform provider to become their in-house SEO – taking one key client and then rolling out changes across the entire platform. During the interviews, it was explained to me that the customer base was almost guaranteed to stay:
- The contract had a long notice period (I think it was either 9 or 12 months)
- The customers were getting everything to run their business – from payment gateways to order fulfilment – which made it a logistical nightmare to leave, purely from a practical perspective
I’m sure that makes sense for the owners of the platform, but for a business it’s a pretty awful thought that getting away from a platform might take over a year and incur big costs: you would be paying retainers and such at the same time as paying for a new build alongside it (and more if you need new logistics integration etc).
Conclusion
Despite ragging so heavily on them, ecommerce platforms have their place. If you’re a small company or sole trader then an out-of-the-box solution can be the easiest way into the market place. If you’re an established name then it borders on lunacy to go down this route. Go bespoke. Please.
15 Comments
Andy B - http://www.andrewblackburn.co.uk
Hi Paul,
Speak to Dave about sports betting platforms… think of them as the worst e-commerce site you’ve ever worked on, that has been doused in petrol and set on fire, and it’s your job to give it a cuddle.
Here’s the biggest part of my grudge against the current providers. You usually have 2 choices, a white-labelled solution (same back end as 100 other sites, with a different front end, akin to your example above) or you buy the software outright, spending extra spondoolies up front and on your own hardware, bandwidth, etc… Now it comes to customising that software you’ve just paid for, to make it fit your business (read: SEO) needs and they will turn around and say that the feature you requested cannot be developed without rolling out to all other owners of the software… nor will they give you license to amend the software yourself, even though, on paper, you own it outright and have permission to modify the code.
Paul Carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
Hi Andy – let’s just say that I am FULLY conversant with the situation you describe 😉
Horrible stuff. It really stifles the user experience too. I work in a couple of markets where there are so few differences between the top sites because they basically offer the same thing with slightly different graphics. They’re prepared to invest so much in a ‘brand’ and so little in the user experience. Baffling, in a lot of ways.
Andy B - http://www.andrewblackburn.co.uk
Yup… casino and poker sites seem to be dealing with it a little bit better… but sports is lagging behind, perhaps due to the old school mentality of the industry.
O***s by any chance? LOL
Leo - NetAccountant - http://netaccountant.net
In your cynic view in graphic form, shouldn’t it be “I can’t 302 out of stock products to anything relevant without a support ticket” ? Is redirection even the best way to go about handling request to out of stock items?
Paul Carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
Hi Leo – possibly. Not really the point of the article though 🙂
Leo - NetAccountant
Nope not really, but as you used it, I thought you might have an opinion on it.
I don’t deal with ecommerce SEO anymore so cannot comment of the flexibility – or lack thereof – ecommecre platforms 😉
Paul Carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
🙂 OK – well I guess it would depend on the customer and the product a bit. We’ve got a bit of divided opinion as to what the ideal solution is… hard 404 or 301 or a 302.
Personally I go with a 301 to get empty pages out of the index and put equity into categories or other product pages (I’m talking here about the kind of site where there could be 2000 products with a life cycle of a couple of months or less) but there’s a lot of arguments in favour of other solutions – including just leaving the page with an ‘out of stock’ message.
Hmm… there could be a blog post in this!
Leo - NetAccountant
Cheers for the answer. I guess it also depends on the current “strength” of the page (inbound + ranking) and its relevancy to what else you have in your stock.
Definitely got material for an interesting post 🙂
Tom
Great rant & great read 🙂
Gavin - http://gavinlilley.com
I enjoyed this article because I have been through this process 18 months ago and the outcome was to build a solution from scratch as there was nothing on the market that fit the criteria of a simple sales focused site which gave the same basic control that users of the (free) wordpress site take for granted.
With regards to 301 old skus – I prefer to leave them as a page or part of an archive that points to new products as this maintains old deep links and in addition builds the page count of the site.
chuck - http://www.cranialborborygmus.com
Paul,
I know what you mean. 🙂
We have an e-commerce site that was set up years ago, and the online store part is not seo friendly at all, but it works. We tried to make some “fixes” last year and messed things up, but got them back to the way they were before. We decided to live with the store as-is for now and just seo the main part of our website. We’re probably missing out on a lot of potential, but we don’t want to risk messing up what we already have.
Maybe next year we’ll just bite the bullet and install a whole new system… or maybe not. 🙂
Chuck
cindymatt
friendly at all, but it works. We tried to make some “fixes” last year and messed things up, but got them back to
Paul Carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
Hi Cindy… I think something got lost when you posted?
chuck - http://www.cranialborborygmus.com
Paul,
The commenter “cindymatt” got her “comment” by copying the words out of my comment above her. I think cindymatt might be a bot… or an extremely lazy human.
Chuck
Paul Carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
Cheers Chuck – didn’t pick up on that (day off tomorrow so I’m in ‘friday mode’ :))