Next Generation Shopping

I’m doing a side project that involves setting up a merchant e-commerce site. What I have come to quickly realize is that there are a ton of e-commerce shopping cart solutions out there! With a small budget for the project, I was looking for something that was open source. I’ve written this article about two that grabbed my attention, and why I ended up going with a paid solution. This is in no way a complete analysis so if you are looking for more e-commerce solutions, PayPal has a great list (all PayPal enabled of course), and 411ASP.NET has a list specific to .NET.

I should mention that the majority of this write-up contains personal notes, but hopefully they are helpful to those interested (as I did do a fair amount of research). Again, the first two solutions I looked at are currently FREE and open source. The third costs $500 (Standard version), which comes with the full source code upon purchase, but isn’t open source.

Getting Started

Here are the solutions I looked at:

dashCommerce is the successor to Commerce Starter Kit, and is freely available on CodePlex. This is great for those ASP.NET developers used to working with it that wish to contribute. However, it seems to be a one man show right now as far as development. We’ll see if it can indeed keep pace with the market.

Magento Commerce is an open source PHP e-commerce solution led by Los Angelos based E-Commerce firm Varien. The solution stakes claim to unprecedented flexibility and control. You can jump into learning right away as they have a bunch of tutorial screencasts on their site.

Znode Storefront is an ASP.NET 2.0 solution that “specializes in secure, scalable e-commerce solutions driven by customer needs.”

Below are my notes on some parts I was most interested in. I have provided additional information in a tabular grid below as well.

Development Status

• Magento was recently launched in Beta and it is not recommended to use in a production environment. A functional version is in the works and Varien is shooting for Q1 2008.
• dashCommerce has just released version 2.2 and has sites in a product environment. Major changes are in order for the next version (3.0) which is slated tentatively for December 2007 / Q1 2008.
• Znode Storefront has sites and can be used in the production environment.

Community Following

• Magento seems to have the largest community following of the three. They have a Wiki section and allow the community to contribute. Continued development is by Varien.
• dashCommerce has a decent community following, but it currently seems somewhat disorganized. Community can contribute via CodePlex. Continued development is by Chris Cevyas.
• Znode, not being open source like the others, does not appear to have much of an active community. However, they seem to be dedicated to continued improvement of their product (see roadmap).

User Interface / CSS

• Magento. I’m a sucker for good lucks and that’s exactly what Magento is: Good Looking! Utilizing Scriptlicious, AJAX, and tagging it has Web 2.0 written all over it. It comes with a wide array of features “out of the box.”
• Znode has a structured CSS and Master Page system setup that seems ideal for customization. The admin area allows editing of CSS via a form Textbox similar to working in the popular Wordpress blogging software. It boasts further AJAX UI in future versions.
• dashCommerce seems to be the most messy to tailor via CSS. This should be changing in their next release, version 3.0. Read more »