Does anyone have experience with a good, free and open-source ecommerce solution for ASP.NET? I know there are a ton out there for PHP and other languages, but I'd like to find one written in .NET (C# preferably).
I tried dashCommerce a few months ago and I found it to be very buggy. Maybe it's matured since then, but I would hesitate to try it again without a firm recommendation.
The only other one I found was DotShoppingCart. It looks promising. Does anyone have experience with it?
ASPDotNetStorefront
http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-sdk.aspx
Look under Source Code Available. It is not free, but if you want an open-source, robust, fully-featured e-commerce solution with support, written in C#, then this is probably your best bet.
I did a dashCommerce site for a friend a couple of weeks ago, and while there are some bugs, there's nothing that's broken that's not fix-able.
So, if you're willing to work with it for a little while (hours not days) and are able to fix stuff as it comes up, dashCommerce is acceptable for a small time e-commerce site.
As a free app, it's usable.
I wouldn't pay for it though.
nopCommerce (http://www.nopcommerce.com) is new but very popular open source e-commerce solution. nopCommerce is available for free. A solution with comprehensive features that are easy to use for new online businesses, yet powerful enough for the most demanding e-commerce expert. It’s a secure, scalable and extendable e-commerce platform.
nopCommerce has a young but growing community of contributors. It is a very active community that is passionate about developing a very robust ASP.NET open source e-commerce application. nopCommerce has over 15,000 downloads for the last month, it's pretty popular.
nopCommerce is a fully customizable shopping cart. It's stable and highly usable. nopCommerce is a open source e-commerce solution that is ASP.NET 3.5 based with a MS SQL 2005 (or higher) backend database. Our easy-to-use shopping cart solution is uniquely suited for merchants that have outgrown existing systems, and may be hosted with your current web host or our hosting partners. It has everything you need to get started in selling physical and digital goods over the internet.
nopCommerce can be up-and-running within minutes. Developers can simply download the software, and follow the simple installation instructions. We have a solution for our customers looking for a powerful web site building platform.
nopCommerce is developed to take full advantage of the newest technologies available. nopCommerce has a pluggable architecture which allows additional functionality and presentation elements to be dynamically added to the application at run-time. nopCommerce is the best e-commerce software for building web site.
For more detailed information, please check out the Feature List (http://www.nopcommerce.com/FeatureList.aspx)
I'm leaning towards dashCommerce but don't have much experience with ASP.NET. I installed it and it's building and I can see the Home page. Now I'm trying to add a left side menu and I would appreciate if someone could give me a sample code that creates a left side menu in dashCommerce.
Thanks in advance.
I will give you a firm recommendation for nopCommerce. I have recently put version 1.20 into production and cannot say enough about it. It is extremely feature rich, integrates with a bunch of payment gateways, is localizable, offers live currency updates (you have to click a button but it is still pretty sweet), an message sending engine and a bunch more.
In my case there were very few, if any, bugs in the application itself. It lacks unit tests which would have been nice, and i updated the look and feel, added custom screens and introduced antixss, but it saved me months of work and I am extremely happy with the end product.
As a side, there is a limitation in the license that says a "powered by nopcommerce" text must be displayed on all pages (I believe this extends to non-ui libraries that you want to use is a non-ecommerce site but i'm not sure). This text can legally be removed for a one-time fee of $50. It doesn't really bug me too much so I've chosen to leave it as is for now, but it is a definite constraint.
I've tried to install dashCommerce & nopCommerce, and with my experience, I'd like to use nopCommerce instead of dashCommerce, the nopCommerce backend control is more convenient for me and the css is easier to re-design. Some of the information could be found at here
Best Regards,
I've been working with AspDotNetStorefront for the past 6 months... customising it, integrating it with an inhouse service delivery system, extending it to include some new functionality that was not included (eg: nested products).
Here's what I can say about ASPDNSF:
PROS: 1. Feature wise, its excellent. Has almost anything you'd ever need from a shopping cart system 2. Skinning is fairly easy, using their 'patented' xmlpackages technology (this, i believe, is the biggest problem with aspdnsf with respect to extending/ adding features) 3. The database isn't too bad - easy enough to find your way around
CONS: 1. The code is truly awful. I'm pretty sure it started off as a VB or ASP/VBScript app, so 90% of the code is procedural spaghetti code. This makes adding new features incredibly difficult 2. Their 'patented' xmlPackage technology for rendering of pages basically adds a level of complexity that i feel is totally unnecessary. To add to this, the xslt files query the database directly using inline selects, and render the results out on the page. Where the results depend on a condition (eg: is Kit complete? show add to cart button : show incomplete message), a call is made from the xslt to a .net class function, which returns a huge blob of html which is inserted directly in the page. 3. Probably around 50% of the html rendered is via String.Appends() in the c# code (core projects). 4. There are hundreds of inline sql calls throughout the core projects. 5. Variables are badly named (eg: anId, thatId, thisId, etc), and code comments minimal 6. The admin interface is messy and difficult to use 7. Practically any functionality changes require core code changes - which is going to make upgrading a nightmare (or probably just not viable to be honest)
So in summary, if all of the features you require are covered by the feature set, then you'll be fine with ASPDNSF. If, however, you plan to add more features, extend the product, or do anything out of the ordinary with it, look the other way now - I've had a miserable time trying to extend this product, something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies.
Moving on to possible alternatives... i started evaluating dashCommerce a few days ago, but have since discovered that the project has been discontinued, so I have done the same with my evaluation.
Yesterday I discovered nopCommerce (www.nopcommerce.com), and I must say I'm very impressed. Feature wise it's a little lighter than ASPDNSF, but the code looks fantastic. It's fully object oriented, n-tier (object model, data layer, presentation using ascx & code behinds, abstract classes for payment providers, shipping providers, etc). On the whole its looking like it will be a pleasure to use, and especially extend. The interface is really nice too, and its open source with a solid community and much interaction by the core team.
My tip: Go for nopCommerce.. if it doesn't fit your needs, extend it. Adding the extra features to nopCommerce would have taken weeks less time than trying to change default functionality of ASPDNSF. If only i could undo the past few months and do them again with NC.
Hope this helps somebody out there... I wish I'd read a post like this before going down the ASPDNSF route (even though the product was chosen before i came on board, so it probably wouldn't have made a difference unfortunately).
I would second the recommendation for nopCommerce, i've used this and dashcommerce but found nopCommerce to be much easier to modify.
Followup to this item, anyone who wants to use dashCommerce will likely notice that the project was recently discontinued. The project has been forked and is hosted at opennetcommerce.codeplex.com now, more to make it available for maintaining existing stores and for bug fixes.
I just stumbled across this: http://thebeerhouse.codeplex.com/.
Looks promising at least to be able to customize and build on top of.
You might also want to look at frameworks such as Sharp-Architecture and Do Factory's Design Pattern Framework ... both have ecommerce code. Especially if you like ASP.NET MVC, Test Driven Design, and Domain Driven Design.
edit: also look at Who Can Help Me for further info on Sharp and ecommerce
hi, I've just converted nopCommerce into a DotNetNuke module, for more info www.sysdatanet.com
Can anyone tell me if nopCommerce (noopCommerce?) or any of these other solutions are meant for multiple domains hosted out of the same physical asp.net application? Trying to put together a cheap solution for a client, and it seems like any of the Open Source projects are meant to only host 1 site in the system.... I can edit the system to be multi-tenant, but would rather work on the other parts, and use the default system, for now, as-is.
Thanks in advance.