We have found that merchants tend to be more interested in supporting users that have cookies disabled than in keeping session IDs out of URLs. We recognize the potential for problems with this, which is why we made it configurable.

That’s a pretty thorough answer. Although I don’t necessarily agree with the logic, I do understand it.

Anyway, the sites I found were on this page:

http://www.mountainmedia.com/ecommerce-solutions.cfm

One of them was the Christmas Night, Inc. site. The other was Speed Sports, Etc.

I didn’t just ask the session hash question because of search engines either. I asked because there are users that have a habit of copying/pasting URLs from various sites, and when they hve session hashes, that causes problems.

From a sheer usability standpoint, I personally wouldn’t want to see them there at all. But that’s just me.

I can’t be sure which stores were viewed here given how many clients we have, so I am going to answer this in two parts:

1. Our website lists several clients that have been around a long, long time. It’s very possible the sites you saw were running in a much older platform than Mountain Commerce 6.0. Older versions of Mountain Commerce had some SEO inadequecies that were addressed in the later versions, especially 6.0 where the whole idea was SEO-friendliness.

2. Mountain Commerce 6.0 will display a session in the URL but ONLY once, after your first click into the site you will see no session ID’s anywhere, just clean URL’s. Now, 2 points about that:

A. When Mountain Commerce 6.0 detects a bot instead of a user, session ID’s are turned off. Bots do not see that initial URL that you might.

B. If you do a site: search of Commerce 6.0 stores (christmasnightinc.com, ejazzlines.com, sarabearbaskets.com, etc) you’ll see all the pages indexed properly. You will NOT see session ID’s indexed or any junky URL’s at all.

I hope this answers your questions. I would be certainly happy to discuss this via email or in person with anyone that has further questions.

Of course, now that I have gotten to meet Donna and enjoy her blog, I will be reading it constantly and I am sure she will pass along any further concerns or questions to me.

Because I looked at some of the sites they have listed using the carts and they appear to be using a variant of session hashes in the URLs.