Hello everyone. I'm new here and was hoping to get some advice. Someone I know here in my town owns the local herb shop. He desperately needs a new website, and since that's what I do, he asked if I would help. His shop is doing extremely well, and now its time to branch out into the internet world. Problem is, I have never done a shopping cart before. So, I see this as a win/win situation. He gets a new site, and I get to acquire a new skill.

I have been researching some free shopping carts, since naturally we want to keep the costs down. These are the ones I have grown on since looking:

Magento
osCommerce
PrestaShop
ZenCart
CRE Loaded

Basically what I need is to know what kind of experience have people had with these carts?

How easy are they to use?

How customizable are they, looks wise?

I have done extensive SEO work on his site before. Am I able to use the same URL's and Keywords so I don't lose the Search Engine Positioning?

What I am looking for is a shopping cart that I can make look however I want it to, while keeping my old URLs and SEO.

Thank you for your help

Hello.. welcome to forum
http://www.taraherbs.com/
Herb Store recently completed using zencart..
This is possible using zencart.

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Unusual and Special Gifts

I've had some experience with all those carts with the exception of PrestaShop. You can customise their templates extensively so getting the right look shouldn't be a problem.

ZenCart or Magento would be my choice, Zen is easier to use and has a much larger user base though.

To best way to retain the old URLs is to 301 redirect the old URLs to their new equivalents, this will prevent 404 page not found errors from occuring and transfer the search engine standing of the old pages onto the new ones. The most common way to achieve this on an Apache server is to use mod_rewrite in an .htaccess file (if you search this forum, you'll find instructions on how to do this). Other servers use similar systems to Apache's mod_rewrite that can be used instead.

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Lawrence