Some advice on NOPCommerce

Starting to do some work on an online gifts website. I have not worked on an e-commerce solution before. What I need from the solution is:

    *  The store front in MVC2 pattern. Build from scratch is fine. (desirable)
    *  Complete UI Independence - The user interface would use a lot of AJAX and jQuery. (very imp)
    *  Paypal, Autherize.Net and other major payment gateways compatibility. (desirable)
    *  Fast data access (very imp).
    *  Modest learning curve and good documentation. (desirable)
    *  Customizable (more than desirable)

NOPCommerce seems to be the only widely used open source solution. How well it scores in the above mentioned points?

kalesh wrote:

1. I assume you mean MVC (Model View Controller) pattern, using ASP.NET MVC 2. nopCommerce uses web forms (Model View Presenter). It is unlikely to change to MVC any time soon.
2. The current UI does not use a lot of AJAX. It is easy to enhance it with jQuery but is certainly more difficult to implement AJAX than if it was using MVC
3. Yes these are supported
4. Data access speed is okay - it's not as good since moving to EF but there are still a number of optimizations to be made
5. Definitely a winner here - architecture is simple and code is self describing. No official developer documentation but there is a user guide you can purchase from the nopCommerce site
6. Easily customizable

Thanks for the response.
I downloaded the solution and went through the code, and yes the architecture is very simple and code is quite understandable.
How feasible is it that I use the data access dlls, couple of other features and go ahead with my own framework or say storefront?

It's achievable, but there would be no going back :)

NopCommerce as it stands is not well suited to MVC since there is a lot of logic in the pages/controls and currently, the business and data access layers are very tightly coupled.

I think you could reuse the data access layer but you would probably need to roll your own service layer on top.