Setting Up ECommerce in ASP.NET

Question

I'm an ECommerce newbie. I'm looking for an exceptional guide for setting up casual ECom (or plugging it into an exsiting site) for ASP.NET, complete with recommended components for a product catalog/shopping cart/merchant account and any anything else I might need.

I don't have a large product inventory (less than 50) and don't plan on doing more than 100 transactions a day.

Ideally the components would be highly configurable and be reasonable in price (or free). I'm not looking for someone to go shopping for me, I would appreciate it if you've actually used or had experience with the components you recommend.

Failing that if you can find a dynamite article/walkthrough I'd take that too, I didn't find much on the end of a Google search.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Dash Commerce is pretty much the default open source c#/.net e-commerce platform. It's got the biggest community, is under active development, has Enterprise options (ie, if you want to, you can pay for support) and is actually used by a lot of websites, so you can be fairly confident it's mature, reliable etc. There are also lots of payment plugins already available, which is a bonus as payments are tricky and need to be done securely and reliably. Unfortunately Dash Commerce seems to have disappeared off the face of the internet. nopCommerce is the next most mature and active ASP.Net Webforms alternative.

IIRC it was originally written by Rob Connery as a project to use Subsonic, but it's matured and grown it's own self sustaining ecosystem since then.

Rob has also created the MVC Storefront as an ASP.Net MVC learning exercise. It's probably less mature and harder to use than dash commerce, but if part of the exercise is the technical challenge, then it might be very interesting.

Answer 2

There is also a new open source ASP.NET commerce site solution called nopCommerce. Very easy and full featured.

http://www.nopcommerce.com/

Answer 3

Kentico CMS is a asp.net CMS and E-Commerce platafform i use it. Is a system whith cms, workflow, and e-commerce very cool if you want a software with 3 systems in one. Now have a free licenses.

Some features: CMS, Blog, Forum, Workflow, E-Commerce, Calendar, Polls, Online forms, Media libraries, etc...

Answer 4

You can also check out SutekiShop, simple open source e-commerce implementation of ASP.NET MVC. It contains good programming practices, so it's good for learning (agile/tdd/ddd/...) and simple enough to be modified or templated.

Answer 5

Another option you may like to consider is Umbraco. This is an open source CMS which is easily extendible. There is currently a Commerce for Umbraco package in beta that is due to be released this summber.

Answer 6

Another e-commerce project to .net is for DotNetNuke is a project named NB_Store very cool and powerful.

Answer 7

There is a preview ecommerce site using the MVC framework on CodePlex. It was created by Rob Conery (Subsonic creator) and his development was chronicled on his blog.

http://blog.wekeroad.com/category/mvc-storefront

The source is on CodePlex (do a search for 'MVC Sample Apps')

Answer 8

Since I can't post a comment yet, I'm posting here (but this is in reply to Mufasa here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/973840/setting-up-ecommerce-in-asp-net/1054918#1054918)

Ecommerce on Kentico is pretty simple until you need some other payment gateway than Authorize and Paypal. Then it's a little more tricky (and their documentation doesn't help).

Having said that we've already churned out two ecommerce stores (and a third coming soon):

http://www.pureperformancecycles.com and http://www.sst-us.com - both use Authorize as their payment gateways. Pure Performance was nice and simple because it just used the standard Authorize gateway, but SST-US was a little more complicated, but we got there