Hello Community

I am a .net developer but new to eCommerce and I must suggest a web shop to a customer of us. This web shop will act as a base for a much more complex one. So I will have to add a lot of code to it.

I evaluated many eCommerce products and I am now down to two completely different products: nopCommerce which is free, but no documentation and Mediachase with a lot of documentation, but quite expensive.

Does anyone have experience with either of the two and perhaps can even give me some comparison or a hint which one is better for our purpose?

Any comment is welcome.

Many thanks.

Just a quick observation since you are looking at it from a development perspective.
Mediachase seems to be ASP.NET 3.5, and nopCommerce is MVC 3. I am a big fan of MVC, because it is extremely powerful and extendible. ASP.NET 3.5 would definitely feel like a step back to me.

I used a previous version of mediachase before coming to nopcommerce and i can tell you unequivocally that nopcommerce is a much easier product to work with.

Mediachase is expensive if you want source code, and the source code is (or was, it's been over a year since i've dealt with it) a huge mess. Their sales staff sold the product to us and told us it would do everything we wanted, only to back track when we tried to implement. Ended up having to go through Amex to get our money back on that product.

Gave nopcommerce a try and we were up and running within a couple of weeks. Cost us a lot of time and money to learn that lesson, hopefully this will save you some of the stuff we went through.

microteq wrote:

I don't have any experience with Mediachase- but when I was looking for a platform to work on, the 2 big reasons why I went with nopCommerce was:
Pliable- I could modify the code and add to it.
Community Support - I saw that there were answers and problems being fixed in the forums.

I agree that there isn't much documentation, or what documentation I saw wasn't very detailed. This hasn't been a problem for me because I've been able to read how something works by following the code or asking about it in the forums.

microteq wrote:

We're always working to improve our documentation and if you have some specific topics that are not covered in the user guide or the developer documentation please let us know.

http://www.nopcommerce.com/documentation.aspx

Many thanks for your interesting answers.

I am also a bit anxious about bying a product for a lot of money without knowing if they can deliver what they promise. It is old technology, I agree.

skyler.severns:
What I am missing most is a documentation of the web service api.

Many thanks.

skyler.severns wrote:



well, its been over a year since i last looked at the available documentation; they have really stepped up.

Mediachase is quite good shopping cart. Its architecture is not bad, but I really do not like "active record" pattern for database layer. And they use stored procedures almost for everything as nopCommerce 1.40 did (really hard to maintain).
I played (and saw their source code) with almost all paid asp.net shopping carts (mediachase, aspdotnetstorefront, znode etc). All of them are written using asp.net webforms (although I saw the latest versions of their source code more than one year ago, maybe something was changed since then), none of them had unit tests or used patterns such has IoC/DI. He's my rank:
1. znode. Very good but too expensive.
2. Mediachase.
3. aspdotnetstorefront - the worst one (terrible source code, just unreal to support) but the most popular for some reasons (I don't understand why).

Anyone see ablecommerce ? I have heard good things about it..

Jaybone wrote:
I saw ablecommerce. Its architecture is not so good. I would place it to the third place:
1. znode
2. Mediachase
3. ablecommerce
4. aspdotnetstorefront