FYI, CSS has nothing to do with SEO. For a shopping cart to be more SE friendly it would have static appearing URLs with keywords in it and be easily crawled (i.e. no session IDs in the URLs).

Just being css has no effect on seo but. What you can do in css can really help. If the store is done in css you can move you content up just below the head tag. My oscommy store content is in the Last 1/2 of the source. I know oscommy v3 alpha is all css driven but its going to be awhile. I was seeing if there is anything else out there other than oscommy. I don't mind paying for a cart.

I agree, css has much to do with SEO, if a spider has to dig through 10,000 nested tables than it will be harder to index the site also you need the SEO friendly URLs as well.

Have you looked at Zen Cart? (you can google Zen Cart, I didn't know if it was ok to post a link here).

It is XHTML based with very few tables and has SEO friendly URLs (module).

Also you might want to add something else with the cart such as a CMS or blog to add text content to the site so you will have good linkable content.

Not true. HTML can only harm you if you make serious errors. In that case it may cause parsing issues. Otherwise, large nested tables will not cause you to have any issues getting indexed or ranking well.

Wanna put some $$$ on it?

Considering that there are thousands of websites to verify my point I don't think you should try to turn this into a wager. Also consider there are no studies showing a lot of HTML hurts your rankings. I'm even fairly certain the search engines have not published anything saying anything to the contrary as well.

In fact, I'd love to see what evidence you have to support your claim.

Firstly, going the CSS route with less HTML markup and nested tables dramatically increases browser rendering times for the user. As far as search engines are concerned, search engines do take into consideration the file size of each page they access. They will limit the number of bytes that they download per session so as to not allow googlebot to take down a server spidering an entire site in one session. Additionally, they will only index the first 100KB or so (not sure of the exact number, but something like this) of a page. HTML markup takes up a lot of kilobytes. There is evidence in this in the Google Webmaster Tools, where Google now allows you to see graphs of the number of bytes download per day, and temporarily control the rate at which googlebot can spider your site if you have enough bandwidth to spare.

Additionally, search engines put more weight on the content which appears closer to the top of the page. Suppose you have a two-column table where the left column is a sidebar and the right column is the main content. The left column (the sidebar navigation) will always appear first in the HTML markup, giving the navigation slightly higher importance over main content. With a completely CSS layout, you could use fixed positioning to put the markup for the left column below the markup for the right column in the (x)html code, thereby putting the higher prioritized information closer to the top of the page.

csgal, you're my hero!

You took the words right out of my mouth!

With your main content being positioned with css so it comes first, then your navigation, etc, etc, it makes for better indexing.

CSS can help SEO dramatically. As previous posters of this thread have noted it can put the "good stuff" up towards the top of the page, and also dramatically reduce the tags that mark up the page (removing style and positioning to a different file).

So, I would disagree that CSS has nothing to do with SEO. I think it is an SEO enabler. Some crawlers also look at ratios of HTML vs. Content. The higher the content ratio the better you are looking.

Here is an example of how to spot an SEO optimized site:

Using a developer tool bar disable CSS for a page. If the page reminds you of a college paper, i.e. H1 Tag, followed by content w/ h2 Tags dividing sections, you have created SEO friendly page. Try that with Tables...