What are the pros/cons of ecommerce store as subdomain vs integrated into main domain?

Question

I have a website www.example.com which is currently not an ecommerce site. Now I want to sell some stuff.

What are the pros/cons of setting up the store on a separate subdomain integrated with the main site? SEO? Site maintenance? Changing ecommerce platforms in the future?

shop.example.com/product/gizmo
shop.example.com/cart

vs

www.example.com/product/gizmo
www.example.com/cart

Currently www.example.com is a wordpress site and I'm thinking about using woocommerce as the ecommerce platform.

Answer 1

When you are using two different pieces of software, it is far easier to host the two parts of your site on different subdomains. It is very common to have:

• blog.example.com/ running WordPress
• store.example.com/ running Magento or WooCommerce
• jobs.example.com/ powered by a company that handles HR
• www.example.com/ with "brochure" style sales pages

When you have a small number of subdomains with the same copyright information that all link to each other, Google will treat it all as one site. Some SEO experts will claim that such an arrangement is bad for SEO, but in my experience subdomains for hosting purposes work fine.

Answer 2

As most search engines see subdomains as a new site it could be hard to sync your main domain and e-commerce subdomain. Keeping your e-commerce modules in the main website provides you to maintain your site and improving its SEO easily. You can easily see most professional e-commerce companies keep their e-commerce modules integrated.