We have just put our new cd/dvd shop www.ReignRecords.com.au up online
Generally we found nop was a great option for developing an ecommerce site and we were able to successfully utilise the solution to produce this our first nopcommerce site and build upon the big effort the nop team has put in to create such a great base for developers.
A friend did a basic re-skin which he was able to do and using the css templates and was able to do everything he needed to recreate the design including switching some links / things off which we did not want to use at this stage.
There was only a couple of changes I made to the backend. Which was to add a new payment gateway for the Commonwealth Bank in Australia which was based on the WorldPay payment gateway i.e. the post and return to site type. This proved to be relatively easy to paste in and activate the necessary code once I worked out what was going on.
Though i'm hoping v1.6 will streamline this type of payment gateway integration and also add a "make payment" option on the account page/orders tab so a purchaser can re-initiate payment if perhaps the posted session timeouted out or drop out or there was a problem with the payment or they somehow it all went pear shaped ?
Also a couple of other little changes mainly to focus user attention. The order of tabs on the user account was changed - orders first as this is the current user focus especially if they have just paid. That way they get to see the details for their order first as they will not necessarily want to change their address.
I also made a few changes in the headings in the onepagecheckout to make them a little more friendly and inviting.
We also added some html style based text on the payment and checkout pages so the user understands a little better the payment process they are working through.
I'm leaving any other changes/additions we might want to do to the site until the next release 1.6 and see how it goes from there.
All in all it's been well worth the effort and big thanks to the nop team.