Ecommerce Shopping Carts - Is there a gold standard?

Question

Is there a gold standard among ecommerce shopping cart packages? I would prefer a .NET solution, but any suggestions are appreciated.

I have been looking at ablecommerce and aspdotnetstorefront specifically, but both seem to have mixed reviews.

Edit:

To elaborate on my question, I am looking for a software package that is customizable (both ablecommerce and aspdotnetstorefront offer full source) but out-of-the-box features are also important. If anybody has any experience working with these specific carts then that would be appreciated. Or if there is a better option, I would love to know it.

Edit 2:

Due to the underwhelming response to this question, I'll assume what I've thought for a while; that there is no out-of-the-box solution that sis ideal. So I guess the question would be, has anyone rolled their own ecommerce site, and if so, what pitfalls did you encounter?

Answer 1

I and another programmer work with AbleCommerce every day. We have heavily customized it and made it into our own product but it is good "out of the box" as well. We had some uncommon needs that required so much customization.

It is very easy to use and to modify. We are using ASP.NET and MySQL and are still on the old version 5. I can't speak to the new version (7) but I'm sure it is very much the same.

If you take care with the customizations and don't just gut the features you are not planning to use then you can expand later. We just turned on the coupon feature and it works great but we had deleted a few lines of code that implement it. After a quick edit to restore those routines it worked great!

I would not hesitate to recommend AbleCommerce to anyone who is willing to tweak it to suit their exact needs.

Answer 2

I develop eCommerce sites for very large companies and keep abreast of the shopping cart world as much as I possibly can.

One approach for pure .NET e-commerce is Commerce Server. You can tweak the reference implementations that it comes with to something that suits your needs. Everyone's definition of Gold Standard is different but since Microsoft develops Commerce Server actively, it's got to be one of the top in the category.

Magento is the other one for small to medium scale PHP sites and seems to be making quite the splash in the e-commerce channel.

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Answer 3

I have been developing on the aspdotnetstorefront for a while now and i must say, there are good things and bad things with the platform. The main reason you may look at an existing platform is that it has hopefully gone through a lot of testing. There are a lot of functions build-in and it supports a lot of different paymentmethods (which all have their own kind of implementation).

We have been thinking about building a new e-commerce site from scratch using ASP.NET MVC for the customer front-end and ASP.NET Webforms for the backend administration interface. The problem is money since that developmentprocess is quite long. Iterative development will have us up and running quite fast but the lack of functions will make us go trough many iterations before we end up with a platform that we can put into production.

Still, after some time on the aspdotnetstorefront platform i can recommend you this.

Will you have a basic productshop that can make use of the default functions and configurations in storefront: Go for it, it is still a good platform with A LOT of stuff in there.

Do you have many ideas of customizing things, doing extra-extra layout/style modifications: Go build your own. Keep in mind that it will take a lot of time but if you plan the development you will end up with a platform that is faster and easier to customize

Answer 4

Edit 2 reply.

The biggest pitfall we ran into was that we built a 85% customized store based on AbleCommerce. We tried but were not super-diligent in documenting everything we did. Now to upgrade to the latest version of AbleCommerce we will have to spend considerable time reverse engineering some of our stuff.

Also, do not strip out code "we'll never use". We stripped out the coupon code and lo and behold, we need to do coupons now, 3+ years later. Fortunately it was a few lines of code that could be replaced, but it could have been ugly.

Just keep in mind that you will eventually want to upgrade your core product or switch to a better one at some point. Write everything as modular as possible and document it all.