Published: March 3rd, 2010
X-Cart is one of many shopping cart solutions available on the net (we’ve already worked with Magento and CubeCart) and recent developments in the Blueclaw e-commerce team has enabled us to work with this shopping cart solution and test its capabilities for one of our clients.
Yes, the client may consider using online shopping cart solutions like Bigcartel (up to 100 products only) and Shopify (up to 50, 000 products only at 699USD per month) and think these may be a simpler solution but is it really cost effective?
“Why spend 700USD a month just to keep the site running when you can buy a shopping cart software yourself and get it customized and have full control over it for much less? Isn’t the point of an online store to reduce overheads as much as possible and concentrate more on selling?”

Like all ecommerce solutions, X-Cart has its own pros and cons but right now I’m going to talk about the features that I believe will help clients with
- large inventories
- medium to large customer base (dealing with delivery and returns)
- utilizing different payment gateways
- run affiliate schemes
- and desire a fully customized, stylish and professional shopping website
Published: February 25th, 2010
Last year Google rolled out the use of Breadcrumbs in their Google Search Results. Some people felt that having Google essentially “rewrite” their URL was a bit out of order. However there are some benefits from the breadcrumbs.

In this ebay example for the search term “buy golf clubs“, their link show their result as a Golf Clubs Buying Guide. However, there is also a breadcrumb link of “Buy” which brings you to the ebay search page. It also shows a link to
Published: June 19th, 2009
This week has raised some questions regarding when to use 301 redirects and where users should be redirected if a user comes across an error page (a 404 page).
Published: April 21st, 2009
I am currently building up a glossary of terms for the Blueclaw site which I hope to put live soon and was inspired to write a post on canonicalization. Unfortunately I am still trying to come up with a good definition for it so I will stick with the definition of Matt Cutts:
“the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices…”
Published: February 24th, 2009
It is one of the most common problems that we come across; people who have undergone search engine optimisation on their site when their knowledge on what it entails is limited. Of course many know the basics (link building, forum posting, optimising your site for keywords etc. etc.) however without careful practice you could be doing more harm to your site than good. The following is a quick list of places where people can go wrong: