"What functionality will I be losing if I use my own catalog / product pages?"

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Short Answer:

In most cases, you will not need to manually create product pages, and “Add to cart” type buttons on your website since the software normally creates the catalog (e.g. category and product pages) for you.  There are rare exceptions where you might want to build your own catalog / product pages manually.    We discourage using this method until you understand what is gained or lost as a result of using it: 

Detailed Explanation:

In some cases, manually creating your product pages will not only make more work for you, but make some features in the software unusable such as the Member pricing system, which allows a shopper to log in and see custom pricing before buying (more listed below).

Often people try to make their own product pages because either:

1. They created them before they began using our shopping cart software—if this is your case, then you should know that it will only cost you more time/work from day one, to try to continue using your own product pages.

2.  They are not familiar with our software’s powerful customization tools such as its sophisticated templating engine—call us and we can show you what is possible.

Other possible disadvantages to using your own product pages (depending on your need):

1. It will take at least twice as long to update your store, since first you have to create the product in the software (to keep it secure), and then manually update it on your site (especially if your products include a “detailed view”).
 
2. Lack of automation tools such as uploading and managing photos, promotion/sales tools, etc...
 
3. If you use the “Search” tool:  “Search” tool pulls up dynamic results (which may, or may not be important to you).
 
4. Inability to use:  Zoom image, cross-selling, breadcrumb trails, paging, catalog rules, automatic inventory status, dynamic menus, cross selling, automatic item feeds, etc….
 
5. More chance for errors.  E.g. You update the shopping cart software on a specific product, and then forget to update the website.
 
6. Incomplete reporting, since the shopping cart software can report which items/categories are being viewed in your store.
 
7. Too many to mention here.

Please note that you will need to update your hard-coded links if any of the following occur:

1. You delete, and then recreate the same product
 
2. Add/change Attributes (if you are using attributes)

When are the most common reasons merchants use their own product pages?

1. You only carry a small handful of items (1-10)
 
2. The sales copy is all on one page; or almost all sales content focused site such as a direct marketing site, or payment system.
 
3. You really need a layout that cannot be designed using our templating system.  Our templating system can reproduce many catalogs of the most well-known retailers on the web.
 
4. You feel that you absolutely must have SEO down to your product level (catalog/products pages), and you do not want to use our official SEO version of the software.  Please note that some of our customers that rely on SEO for their marketing, do quite well, even when using the shopping cart plan without SEO, as long as they create rich content for their site.  The SEO plan is ideal for merchants with lots of items for sale as this really helps the deep search / long tail search.