E-commerce platform for custom application integration

Question

We are building an online subscription-based website and I'm looking for recommendations on which e-commerce platform to use for the checkout process.

Requirements include:

1. Only four products.
2. The sign-up process of the site is heavily customized, and after checkout the user should automatically get logged into the subscriber area.
3. Subscriptions will last one year and can be renewed manually.
4. Support for coupons/discount codes at a later point.

Since the entire application is custom, we've weighed building a custom checkout but are strongly leaning towards using existing software to avoid having to build lots of admin reporting as well as a coupon engine down the road.

The two questions we're pondering are:

• Is it better to a) build our application custom and use whatever e-commerce software we select just for the payment piece, or b) use the e-commerce software as the basis and build our application around it/as a module/etc?

• Which e-commerce platform should we use? I've looked into a variety of off the shelf e-commerce software, but it's not clear to me which would be easiest to integrate with. I've researched on the Web and looked at many of the threads on SO to compiled a list of potential candidates:

www.magentocommerce.com/ (seems difficult to integrate with)
www.prestashop.com/
www.nopcommerce.com/
www.opencart.com/
www.cubecart.com/
www.spreecommerce.com/
www.interspire.com/
www.tradingeye.com/

We're most concerned with the level of effort required with ramping up on the software and then doing the integration with our custom functionality. We're most proficient with PHP, ASP.NET and some ROR and are only considering those technologies. We prefer open source, but would be open to commercial if there's a significant upside.

Any experiences with similar projects and advice is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It sounds like you will want to start with a base commerce product and customize it from there. I look at market penetration and velocity when I select a package. IMHO, Magento has the lead of the ones that you listed.

The challenge is that Magento itself is difficult to work with if you aren't familiar with OO PHP architecture and development in general and Zend Framework in specific. It took my team of seasoned PHP developers a good 8 weeks to get "truly productive" with Magento.

Magento is actually very easy to integrate with the provided API via XML-RPC or web services (http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento_core_api).

Answer 2

Our group of developers is seasoned in ASP.NET and so we chose NopCommerce. I can say, that is pretty well written and easy to setup and install. The only qualm I have had with it is the fact that the repositories are not written in the typical interface/implementation manner, but rather with static classes.

Static classes is okay, but our requirement was to filter the data being returned to NopCommerce-- this makes it a little tricky since we can't just inherit the interface and use DI/IoC to slip in our own repository. However, a good portion of the other code is pluggable-- taxes, payment processor, etc. Not to mention, they have a large list of tax integration plugins and payment processors on their website available for download. There also appears to be a good support base using their forums.

I'm glad that AspDotNetStorefront is not in your list of possibilities-- avoid it like the plague.

That said I would recommend NopCommerce as a good open-source solution. If you're willing to fork out a few extra green backs, take a look at ZNode as well (http://www.znode.com/). We got a chance to look at the code-base and it looks like heaven for a developer.