Questions for developers: AbleCommerce vs aspdotnet..

[scdwebmaster]

To all developers:

We are looking to purchase shopping cart software. We have narrowed it down to either Able Commerce or ASP Dot Net StoreFront. In order to make our final decision, we have three questions:

1) We have been told that the source code is well laid out and easy to manage. Have you found this to be true and would you use Able Commerce again if you "had to do it over again"?

2) Have you had to contact technical support? If so, how easy where they to work with and were they willing to make changes if needed?

3) How hard would it be to implement a set of products that are shown only to a specific group of customers (e.g. law enforcement to law enforcement officials only)?

I appreciate any comments that you may have that will help in our final decision.

Thanks in advance,
John Smith

[afm]

1. AbleCommerce 7 ships with the UI code. It is mostly well laid out and easy to modify. The only caveat is that some of the pages include the code in the .aspx file, while most separate the .aspx and .cs files.
   
   You can also order the source code to the CommerceBuilder library, but it is probably not necessary. The API is very rich and easy to use. It is quite likely that you can complete all your customizations in the UI layer.
2. I have only contacted technical support about administrative issues. In each case they were responsive.
3. That would probably be easy to implement.

[AbleMods]

1) We have been told that the source code is well laid out and easy to manage. Have you found this to be true and would you use Able Commerce again if you "had to do it over again"?

Yes and yes. The code is C-Sharp - not exactly my personal preference but it is well laid-out making it very readable. Keep in mind what everyone today knows as "source code" is not the entire source code. There is a huge library of underlying data classes and methods to which source is not yet available. My understanding is it will be released shortly since AC7 Final is now out.
AC7 makes use of alot of .Net user controls. You will have some learning curve grasping how everything ties together to make a product page. But there design is pretty consistent, so once you get the hang of it the rest becomes very easy to follow.

2) Have you had to contact technical support? If so, how easy where they to work with and were they willing to make changes if needed?

Tech support has been mostly strong for my personal experience. I've worked with Able since September 2007. In most cases their responses were quick and effective. The biggest issue comes with modifications to your site - their ability to respond with support issues on a site such as mine that's been modified heavily is far more limited (for obvious reasons). So in other words the more you modify your site, the less Able can help you. That will be the case most anywhere you go for storefront software.

3) How hard would it be to implement a set of products that are shown only to a specific group of customers (e.g. law enforcement to law enforcement officials only)?

I am not aware of any capability to accomplish this with the current release. This would require extensive modification since all aspects of the search and catalog code would have to be modified. You can limit discounts, coupons and price levels by customer group however the overall catalog is available to all site visitors.

[keats76]

#3) I've done a fair amount of work with role based customization. It's pretty easy to create custom groups (i.e. Law Enforcement) and to determine who is a member of those groups. However, splitting the catalog between different groups would take a good bit of work. You'd have to add additional information to each product etc. to indicate the type of group it would be available for, and then you'd have to filter on that information in a number of places. Could be done, but it would take some time.

Good luck!

[Harley]

Able compared to asp.net storefront, it's not even close, able is far better. I have done work with asp.net storefront. Its a mess, and its biggest issue issue is performance amongst other things. They do xml / xsl transformations on their displays, its a nice idea, but does not work all that quick, and is not easy for any designers to work with when you want to change layouts. I have seen their source code, its outsourced and done badly, very inexperienced stuff done. I would not want to have to work with it. Just my 2c.

[nickc]

There's a solution for the user group catalog filter here: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=7623

[sacards.com]

Hi,
dont even think about AspDotNetStoreFront . i have bought it this january plus source code , costs a fortune , and yet very hard to customize . XmlPackages , stupied idea that makes it difficult to do basic stuff . html is sometime in the source code , and it has bad program design .