I’m not sure about you but it took me a long time to get a good ecommerce solution for my shops. As most of the e commerce entrepreneurs I started with open source solutions such as os commerce and zen-cart. While these ecommerce platforms are not a bad thing, it’s hard to make the ideal shop if you’re not a programmer plus it’s a real pain if you screw something up and need advice or support. Yeah there are forums and groups out there but you get 10 possible solutions for 1 problem and you need to figure out which one is suitable which is not a real ‘timesaver’.

Anyway 2 years ago, while spying on a competitor, I found a backlink to his site on a shopping cart software provider. It was a testimonial page where he spoke about the goodies of their ecommerce solution blablabla..

Like most of us, I was very sceptical but when taking a closer look it didn’t looked that bad at all so I started to research the possibilities of the software and started to compare their plans with other providers. And ultimately I jumped into their standard plan and started to rebuild one of my ecommerce sites.

I have to tell you that I had no programming skills at all and Dreamweaver was the only program I could work with to do a little site design/construction

Web Development Features

I made a few templates to try out and soon I got sucked into the enormous possibilities and features of the software and came to the conclusion that it would take some time to get the full benefit of that storefront software.The first thing you need to do is of course the design which I did in this case with Dreamweaver since I have no clue about html coding. I’m more a visual guy and once I made it there, I took the html code and pasted it into the backend of the software. Along the way, it was necessary to learn some basic CSS skills in order to get the perfect look for the site.

You can assign different templates to custom pages (such as about us,etc) category pages and even product pages. Each template can have a totally different look and navigation. So the navigation on your homepage can be different from the one’s on your product pages which is an interesting thing when it comes to an SEO point of view.

SEO Features

This is a problem with a lot of shoppingcart software ! Long url’s full of strings (which is a real pain for the bots to crawl), duplicate content, bad titles, no H-tags to just name a few. Searchfit solved all of this things and is very flexible in the customization. You can play around with all of these things in a very easy way and you have full control !There’s even more to play with such as breadcrumbs, automatic links to other products in that category, customizable pagination links, automated menus, automatic created robots.txt file, sitemaps, XML sitemaps, the usage of the rel=”nofollow” tag,etc

Shopping Features

I don’t think there isn’t a feature Searchfit doesn’t offer. Cross selling, up selling, product reviews, product comparison, certificates, coupons, whish lists, inventory control, dropshipping feature, multiple stores controlled by 1 backend..you name it they have it. It took me some time to discover all of these features and only a half year later I realised that this thing was “a damn good solution” Hey, I wasn’t familiar with this whole e-commerce thing so don’t blame me.

In the beginning the backend can be a bit overwhelming because there are so many thing you can configure that it’s hard to see which road to take but once you start working with it, it feels quit comfortable..isn’t that the case with all things in live..

Like I said, the droppshipping & affiliate feature is a very handy thing. You can easily create an entire new site for them on their own domain with only the products they like to sell. They don’t have to spend 1% of their energy on that ! You just push a few buttons and they’re ready to promote & sell your products..how about that ?

My Conclussion

In case you didn’t noticed, this is the solution that brought my biz to a whole other level. First, they have the right software application and second they have an excellent customer support. If something isn’t working or you can’t figure out how to do something, you can go to the board (call or email them), post your head breaker there and within a very period of time they will give you all of the info you need to get along with it. No need to spend hours and hours on different boards because you can’t find the right answer. They are the engineers and they know their stuff to the bottom….

As a last word, I just like to stress out that this is an unsolicited testimonial..I’m just a happy customer for years now and like to “give them something in return”..besides the monthly fee I pay them

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to drop me a mail or a comment