There are a couple of different umbraco e-commerce options started, but few that are finished. Some are wholly new programs, while others are umbraco interfaces on top of existing e-commerce solutions.
This thread is to discuss them, and how we can get more finished e-commerce packages available.
uCommerce is a great enterprise solution, feature complete and under active improvement. Easily recommendable if there is the budget to purchase a solution.
Goal here is to discuss the completeness of the open source solutions, and what it would take to get at least one reasonable offering that is free to use with umbraco.
Disclaimer: I am the developer of Procure - Procure is in the early stages of development, and is a wholly new program, not based on any other e-commerce solution.
Thanks for starting this thread! I've used umbraco with e-commerce for over two-years and can say that creating a full-featured, complete, and user friendly solution is a challenge indeed. Obviously, the folks at uCommerce have invested a large amount of time and money in their product and are offering it as a commercial package - as they should! My goal, over nearly the entire past two-years, has been to finish the Commerce for Umbraco project to the point where someone can just download the bits, install it, and start selling. There are a few instances where the planets have aligned and this has actually happened, so I know its possible.
Creating a vialble e-commerce solution is hard, really hard - just ask the uCommerce guys - so I'd hate to see yet another project get started and not get completed. IMO, this will further dilute the limited resources the community has for these projects.
So my suggestion is this: consider using the API level code from C4U to cover at least some of the arcane portions of a a commerce system (say payment provider, shipping provider, tax provider, discount, promotion, etc...). Then use your umbraco know-how to complete the front-end stuff; products, layout, templates, etc.... C4U is MIT licensed so you can just grab what's there and go crazy.
C4U also has some patches which have been submitted and are pending review which address many of the reported issues - if you're game for this I'll add you as a project dev and you can (again) use what's there.
Well, there's a start to the discussion...see where it goes from here.
Yes, it is based on dashCommerce v2.2, but has been optimized for the umbraco runtime.
Incidentally, there is a discussion ongoing around updating the core bits to dashCommerce 3.* as the project's owner has granted Commerce for Umbraco an MIT license for this.
Just to pitch in, the Umbraco Ecommerce Extension has not been touched for a long long time, and I am not sure if anyone have used it with V4. So unless someone wants to spend a lot of time getting into the code, I would probably not go with that.
As Paul says, e-commerce is a very complex thing to build from scratch, and i think that is why there are not tons of packages around for this purpose. It is complex enough when just building for one certain customer, but when trying to make it work for everyone, you will have you hands full.
But I do see the market for the ultra simple shop/basket, if it is possible to narrow down the feature list.
Is the dashCommerce project still active? It looks like their website has been purposely taken down....
I wanted to take a look at the scope of the Umbraco implementaiton versus the standalone dashCommerce framework.
I am one of the few people still using Umbraco commerce extensions, even in V4, but there is considerable amount of work there to make it anything like a finished package. It is very inefficient with regards database calls in the admin section. I was too far in to the build of a clients site before I realised how much was not quite right.
Where I do feel it works well even if not in terms of code quality is how you can create a product doc type and use umbraco how it's meant to be used for presentaiton. Each product is a page/node in Umbraco and so you get the full use of niceurls and XSLT. The extension has a simple datatype which effectively is just a usercontrol to edit the product data in the 4 database tables.
The products are linked 1:1 with the content node which to me is a massive win because I sell Umbraco qualities mainly on SEO and nice URLs are a big part of this. As far as I can see this is better than uCommerce and commerce4umbraco as they have one product page and load the data based on productIds passed in the querystring. (Having a product in more than one category though in the Umbraco content tree causes a few headaches but it is possible to overcome)
I'm actually positive that a well written datatype could store all the data in the doc types but going down this route means starting from scratch.
If I/we can look at pulling Commerce4Umbraco product editing into an Umbraco datatype, improve the XSLT extenstions to allow full control of the e-commerce engine from presentation to payment processing I think we will start to see a very good product.
So a little about how I came to this point - a year ago I went looking for an eCommerce option for Umbraco to use in conjunction with one of our clients sites. I tried Commerce4Umbraco, and also the Umbraco eCommerce extensions. I looked around for other options, but uCommerce wasn't out yet at that point. We ended up creating the functionality we needed from scratch, and it wasn't something that we would be able to use again.
Recently, another client needed an eCommerce solution, and again we looked. This time, uCommerce was available, but we weren't able to use it due to the cost (it is very much worth the cost, we just didn't need the full feature set). Again, we ended up creating the functionality we needed from scratch, and again (due to some exceptionally custom checkout steps mostly) it wasn't something that we would be able to use again.
Since I personally was getting tired of coding the same solution over again, I started work personally planning out what would be needed for a super-simple product management/cart/checkout system that I could reuse each time.
See, my original goal for Procure was the simple shop/basket model that Morten was talking about. I didn't have any dreams of shipping (beyond static per-item), gift card management, coupons, etc - simply for the reason that those things are hard, and take a lot of time to make flexible for everyone to use. Sure, I thought a version release+1 might include those features if someone else would like to contribute, or I had time later... but my initial plans didn't/don't include those.
Now, since Paul has generously offered up existing code that does these, it is something I've thought about over the weekend. If I did add some of those features, I would definitely want to use the existing functionality that Commerce has implemented. I'm not wanting to reimplement the wheel here - I just want something that works easily.
My design goals are/were:
The admin system should feel like a natural part umbraco, not terribly unlike how Media works.
The system should not limit a product to be defined in a node.
Products should be able to be linked to many nodes.
Developers should be able to pull data out of the system naturally like they would from Umbraco - via XSLT if desired, or via UserControls if needed.
It should install as a package, and EASILY.
It would be best if the payment subsytem could use an existing interface definition so that some existing payment processor systems could be used, and not coded specifically for this eCommerce system.
Anyway, that's the state of where I am at - and I definitely don't want to dilute any efforts that others have made and/or are making.
Unfortunately I do not have anything of real benefit to add apart from that I am very interested in where this goes because I have just come out of a team meeting where I have been asked to look into the e-commerce options within Umbraco because we want to setup an e-commerce site for ourselves and possibly for some of our customers. I was asked to look into whether it is possible to do so within Umbraco which it seems at the moment it is if you are willing to pay for it (ucommerce) or if you want to do a lot of work trying to fix bugs (the other beta products)!
We're actually in early stages of an enterprise e-commerce solution as well. It's an iterative process and will take time. But, like Scott mentions above, it's a sticky situation as we don't want to necessarily step on anyone's toes either. What does the community think about this sort of thing? I.e. competitive packages whether they are free or commercial?
Competition is never a bad thing, in my opinion. For example there seems to be a small boost of search options for umbraco, and that seems to improve all the options rather than hurt anyone.
I'd like to reopen this discussion if possible, hopefully this is not too 'off-topic'
We're looking at rebuilding my clients existing .net bespoke E-Commerce solution (built by us) the cart currently works well but the costs to my client are growing every time they want to add new features (coupon codes, user ratings, order tracking etc.) and being bespoke the application takes a lot of our unpaid time to support.
So we're now considering 3rd party options and checking out uCommerce now (though I'm not sure the client will enjoy the cost) but we would love to keep it all in Umbraco.
We're also going to look at AspDotNetStoreFront, we have no experience of this but it's been developed over a number of years, has a rich feature set and is relatively cheap.
The current e-commerce site also has a CMS section which brings me to the question.
Does anyone have any experience /opinions in integrating Umbraco with 3rd party Shopping Carts?
This may offer us a good solution, having the shop on a sub domain and the rest of the site running umbraco, we can then pull products as we need directly into the Umbraco site of things from the AspDotNetStoreFront database (for example).
Would be interested to hear your opinions in this type of integration compared to a 'true' Umbraco solution.
There's just an enourmous gap in the market here I reckon. .NET is screaming out for an app like Magento. When I last checked (about 4 months ago) I couldn't find a single decent open source shopping cart for .NET, which was flexible enough to handle things like subscriptions and multiple payment gateways. I've only ever used bespoke .NET carts, and haven't ever tried to integrate one of those with Umbraco. That doesn't help I'm sure, but I thought I'd put my two cents in since I've struggled with this myself in the past!
Appreciate the reply Dan, at least I know I'm not alone! Agree there is a gap in the market
To be honest it doesn't even need to be open source. Personally I don't think my client will pay for uCommerce + my dev time to integrate it, they would probably pay for ASPDOTNETStoreFront but I hear their support is terrible, the code doesn't validate and worst of all they delete any negative messages from their forums. Not a company I feel like dealing with.
I know this isn't a strictly Umbraco conversation but I'd be really interested to hear of successful Umbraco / eCommerce integrations as I think it's the only thing that it lacks right now.
I know people are working hard the open source route and I don't want to sound negative, it's just I have a client waiting to pay for a solution and am struggling to offer a lowish cost solution that delivers the feature set they need.
I'm going to have another look at nopcommerce today, doesn't look like a very mature product and the last release was way back in June
I wanted to chime in on this conversation as it is, as you can probably imagine, very interesting to me and the uCommerce team :)
We're aware that cost is an issue for a certain segment of the Umbraco market and we're addressing that very issue with uCommerce Starter Edition, which is in the works at the moment. uCommerce Starter is a subset of uCommerce Pro and will support a straight forward upgrade to Pro should the need arise.
A uCommerce Starter license will cost approximately half that of a Pro license - 1,695 EUR - and would support your typical single shop, cart, checkout scenario and still leave room to upgrade should your client need more functionality, but even more importantly it will have all the extension points of the Pro edition.
We're still in the process of finalizing uCommerce Starter Edition and I'd appreciate any input you might have on pricing and feature set.
Sounds like a good idea, i created an e-commerce site recently. Your suggested addition would have been an easier pitch to my client. So at least you get your foot in the door, whilst having a clear upgrade path.
A starter edition of uCommerce sounds fantastic and a great way to build a community around the product too.
It would certainly be an easier sell for me, I'd be interested in what the feature set is.
I haven't had time to fully research uCommerce but here is what my client requires
Multiple images of products
Products can be in more than one category
Basic stock control system, however sold out items should be displayed but not available to buy
Discount coupons. this is a big one for them, needs to be able to be applied to categories, group of products, if the total spend is over, buy this get this free etc. pretty complex!
Order tracking emails (when order placed, when item is marked as shipped)
International Shipping Rates dependent on Zone and weight
There's a few more bits.
I'm not sure if your even the Pro version supports all these currently but even if uCommerce isn't suitable for this particular product I really think the starter kit is a great idea and I'd much rather recommend an Umbraco solution to any new clients.
@Rich: All the features you list are supported by uCommerce Starter Edition except the coupon codes. We're working on getting our marketing foundation ready but for now you have to roll something yourself using our pipeline system - see the following link for an explanation of how to do it http://blog.lasseeskildsen.net/post/uCommerce-Pipelines-Explained.aspx.
I think it's very hard to set the right price for products and especially software. A professor I had at University once designed a lamp, which was designed with low-cost manufacturing in mind, as he wanted to make beautiful designs for the masses that everybody could afford. The retail price was about 15 euro, but hardly any was sold. After a year on the market a friend had an idea about raising the price to 150 euro, and suddenly the lamp sold much better…
Without anything to back it up, I personally think that it’s kind of the opposite with software, as it’s not a lifestyle product, but a technical product, which is sold by features, usability, extensibility, stability etc. I’m not at ALL saying that software relying on free/low-cost OS software like umbraco should be free, but that the price matters even more.
I know there has been put A LOT of hours into making uCommerce, and that it’s an investment that hopefully over time will give a better payoff than the invested time. As I see the pricing of uCommerce it’s set so high, that it’s mainly aimed at bigger agencies (Vertica, Creuna etc.), which typical has clients with larger budgets where the software price matters less. This has the advantage, that the solutions always (hopefully :-) are of higher standard and good references for uCommerce.
But at the same time the price of uCommerce cuts off the majority of umbraco developers/clients from buying it. I believe that if uCommerce (both pro and starter kit) was half the price, it would sell a lot more than double. It will be much easier to build a community around your product (see umbraco), as there are more developers/users using the software, and at the same time the software will be more ‘proven’ and well know, which makes it easier to convince clients to use.
uCommerce already has the software, but from my point of view the price keeps it from being ‘THE’ ecommerce solution for umbraco. Considering the number of umbraco solutions worldwide, I believe the market for the right ecommerce solution build on umbraco – at the RIGHT price is HUGE…
@horsted - I certainly understand that some clients won't want to pay the price it costs for uCommerce Pro, or uCommerce starter edition. I also work with some very small businesses that have trouble meeting a $500 budget for their whole website, let alone a $5,000 budget for just one component.
With that said though, in my opinion uCommerce isn't overpriced. This only becomes more apparent with the release of their Starter Edition.
I think a lot of small businesses want more than they can afford. There is so much OSS out there, that frequently we are able to give them more than they can afford, but in the case of eCommerce this hasn't been the case. There are some things out there that you can try, and possibly get to work - Commerce4Umbraco is an example of that - but it (the process, not c4u specifically) can be difficult. It can be very hard to have a small business grasp an understanding the cost of what they want. And the frustrating part can be that if you do it outside of Umbraco, it could even be possible to do what they want on the budget they need.
I've tried to keep this in mind when developing Procure - a focus on what a business might need, and not what they might want. Procure is (so far) really very simple. It holds maintains products, it allows you to add them to your cart. It will hopefully soon let you check out. It has an exceptionally simplistic view of shipping right now, and that's not likely to change in the near future.
This is far and beyond the main reason that I have maintained that Procure is not in competion with uCommerce - it is a complimentary product. If a business needs more than Procure provides, and still doesn't have the budget to purchase something that can provide those things - perhaps the business has undervalued their website.
Of course, Procure is open source, so anyone may feel free to contribute any feature they feel is a business need, and not just a want.
Procure will be an introduction to e-commerce edition in my opinion, and if a company needs more, or grows into a need for more, then that is when I see they will want to move on to something more robust; like uCommerce. My ultimate hope is that I can design Procure well enough that we can make that an easy upgrade.
Procure is available for code review at http://procure.codeplex.com/ - please note that there is no release or package available yet as I am still in very active early development. You would need quite a bit of know-how to even attempt running it - I haven't even got a database sql file uploaded yet. I'll try to get a bit more documentation up on the website soon so that people can give suggestions as to how the XSLT is working out. I can't emphasize enough how much I value people's feedback and ideas with this project.
Hope I haven't wasted too much of people's time with this post :)
@Scott, interesting discussion. I (like you) don't think uCommerce is overpriced, and I didn't write my comment because I personally need an ecommerce solution, and hope to get uCommerce at half price :-)
My main point is that I believe there today is a huge unfulfilled market for a mature out of the box ecommerce solution for umbraco in an affordable price range. As uCommerce is the first player with an oob cart for umbraco, they have a big advantage and are in a position, where they can take a large part of the market. It would take a reduction in their current prices, but in the end I think the bottom line figures would be bigger, as a lot more licenses would be sold.
As I see it, the first mature, well-featured and easy-to-install ecommerce solution with at the right price could more or less make the other solutions obsolete. With uCommerce aiming at the high-end, the ‘masses’-market is left open for others, and it’s exciting to see what happens when the promising OOS products come out of beta…
I’ll sure be checking out Procure, when needing a ecommerce solution, thanks!
I though i'd just jump in the discussion about uCommerce. I have launched several websites now using uCommerce, and the there are certainly pros and cons. The pros are pretty clear when looking at the features that uCommerce has to offer. It's pretty extendable and it's rather easy to makt it fit you needs.
However, I experience some serious performance issues with the current 1.0 version. I have a customer who have a good 500 orders per month, and uCommerce seem to have issues handling this kind of modest load. I know that uCommerce is build upon subsonic and other non-sql friendly technologies, that makes sql performance horrible. I took the liberty of running the SQL analyser, when doing simple tasks in uCommerce. The results were frightening. When fetching ONE order through the uCommerce API, the SQL database is asked to make more than 500 queries... imagine that.
I can go on and on about the SQL part in uCommerce as I love to tune SQL performance, but I'll save that for another day.
Now I hate to be the one that ruins the party and all, but I would really not recommend uCommerce for any, but test, projects until theese performance issues have been resolved.
@Thomas: We're aware of the performance issue and are working to resolve it with upcoming versions. Version 1.0.2 which is being tested right now is addressing performance issues regarding the Catalog Foundation. The issue you mention regarding the Transaction Foundation is new to me but we'll certainly mare sure to address it for the next version.
I'd like to take this opportunity to mention that the very reason our feedback forum exists is to address any issues you might encounter with uCommerce. I'll make sure and note your concern for transactions in our internal systems now that it's come to my attention, but if you want to make absolutely sure that we pick up on your concerns in the future please report them at the uCommerce feedback forum.
Since this thread was started we release uCommerce Starter Edition, which is priced at 850€. Starter Edition is a subset of Pro, but you get the features most commonly needed for smaller shops and the ability to upgrade to Pro if you need it at some point. No data migration needed - you just enter a new key and you're good to go.
Developing with uCommerce is completely free of charge. You just need a license for your production site. Download Developer Edition at http://www.ucommerce.dk/en/get-it-now.aspx
Have there been any new developements with any ecommerce for umbraco solutions in the last 5 months as I am now trying to find the best solution for my clients requirements. I was all set on using Ucommerce Starter as this thread said it was the best by far even though not free and it looked quite good, but I am having a bit of trouble trying to implement what I need and even though I really want an Umbraco solution i am on the verge of giving up and just moving to nopcommerce or something outside of Umbraco!
In my opinion uCommerce is too difficult/costly/time-consuming to implement for the average e-commerce site.
Seems like there's still a big gap here, if you do go down the nopcommerce route, let us know how you get on as I'm considering doing this too but using umbraco as the CMS.
I had't heard of this new "supersimplewebshop", it says it should be realeased soon but it's only going to be a little cheaper than Ucommerce Starter and it seems with less functionailty, but that said I don't really need all the bells and whistles! I have posted to see if I will be able to do what I want on their forum.
I think Ucommerce could be really good if it had a bit more documention, because that's what it seems to be lacking! The support forum is quite new so not many posts as yet and the ucommerce team seem to take an age to reply to anything so getting help is very difficult! So frustrating!
Seen the new e-commerce for umbraco - Tea Commerce? Its a new simple, flexsible, ecommerce system with a really nice jQuery API to make all the cart functionality - but at the same time the system is totally secure as all functions is validated by the server. If you know umbraco, it will take you little time to learn Tea Commerce.
I've tested Tea Commerce and feel it's easier to get a store online than uCommerce is... the API has all methods you would need. The documentation is easier to follow..
I'd love to hear more specially what we can do better with uCommerce. We're continually producing new documentation of of course would like to make them even better in the future. That said though I guess that part of the explanation that the docs for uCommerce are a bit harder to follow is that our product does more thus requiring more explanation.
@Daniel I'm really glad to hear your comments - its exactly what Tea Commerce is about - making a simple, easy to learn, full feature package to make a nice looking e-commmerce solution. Glad you love the simple documentation and more will follow in the next weeks so you can read how to use member login with Tea Commerce, how to make a payment provider real simple etc.
I realize I'm jumping in to this discussion very late, but this is a particular area of interest for me.
The lack of a decent, open source ecommerce solution is a huge problem with .NET right now. There are several world class ecommerce solutions on the LAMP side of the fence (Magneto, osCommerce, Zen Cart, etc.). In my opinion there are zero for .NET (though I am going to give nopCommerce a shot).
I don't blame the folks at uCommerce or Tea for wanting to sell the code they've invested a lot of hard work in, but the reality is that most web sites aren't constructed for multi-billion dollar global corporations. They're made for very smallbusinesses, with very small budgets. 850€ or even 350€ for a shopping cart is just too expensive for these types of projects.
The "What's the best open source .NET shopping cart" conversation was popular in 2002 when ASP.NET was brand new. It was popular in 2005 when ASP.NET 2 was released, and here we are still talking about it in 2011. And there still is no answer.
How is it that the PHP folks can pump out at least a half-dozen viable ecommerce solutions, and the .NET community can't make one?
It saddens me to think that I'm going to have to keep using the same classic ASP shopping cart my company made a decade ago because there is no viable alternative on .NET that doesn't cost $1,000 per site.
TeaCommerce is not opensource, but isn't too expensive given that you are a developer and can get it working smoothly with Umbraco.
I do think that uCommerce is WAY overpriced.. but you have to understand that the market for TeaCommerce and uCommerce is much smaller being that you have to be using Umbraco, so I can understand them charging for them.
Thank for your quick reply, I have taken a look at TeaCommerce Demo a few days ago and it seems to fit my requirements. Is it fully localizable in IT-it language?
You might be interested to learn that we released uCommerce Free Edition at Codegarden 11. Basically it will get a production site up and running on a great platform at no cost at all. It's basically the version we used to call uCommerce Starter Edition, which supports selling in a market.
It gives you a really good starting point for developing your webshop and it shoudl be easy to replace the english texts with your text and put a simple design on top of it.
If you need help - feel free to ask and I will try and help :)
Considering the original topic regarding Open Sourced Ecommerce Solutions for Umbraco, I have top conclude after 5 pages that there are none that work out of the box.
If I was lucky enough to land a big budget site I would consider uCommerce or TeaCommerce, however like learning a CMS that is open source it may be "free" to download and use but the time and effort you put in to learn a new system is not free.
I have invested a huge amount of time in umbraco CMS and for that reason I won't be changing CMSs any time soon. Its the same for a ecommerce solution. You invest in the product and learn it and provide feedback etc. If I have to cough £1500 and spend a whole bunch of time learning it too then I am not sure I would make any money (for the first few sites anyway).
I am looking for an ecommerce module for Umbraco too and have tested a few so called open source solutions. However if you have to put up with a banner logo then it (for the most part) simply won't do. I'll have to stick with my asp.net shopping cart code I wrote 3 years ago.
On a positive note, I am not a slick whizz bang whollop developer as many of you are, but I would be happy to contribute some time to develop such a package for Umbraco.
Like most umbraco packages there will always be some kind of work included to get it working. Some packages more than others. Ecommerce packages are quite large systems and can be complex, but as you stated your self - it will take time to learn the first times, but then it gets easier and you can do the sites in less time.
You're quite right that there's no such thing as completely free.
I would, however, point out an interesting trend I'm seeing among the uCommerce partners who have invested in learning to use it. Basically what's happening is that they are able to land bigger/different projects than before becuase they are able to expand their business to include new and different business opportunities. Of course the tool alone doesn't do it, but it does help you get started. It will in some instances even open up for new oppotunities as new prospects are starting to ask for e-commerce solution, specifically on Umbraco.
Store managers contact us on a regular basis asking for a partner to help them with their uCommerce implementation and I personally take great pleasure in redirecting prospects to our partners helping them with a bit of business, especially because they've seen fit to spend the time and effort to use our tools. That's what makes a great eco-system in my opinion :)
I guess what I'm trying to say that you can see the situation as either an expenditure or an investment. There will be an upfront investment, but I'm seeing a tenfold return on it; in our partner network at least.
The project is called Tea Commerce and is a plug-in to Umbraco using JavaScript to access an e-sales API on the server, the plug-in consists of three parts. • An extensive JavaScript API and related server REST API • An xslt library for Umbraco • A server kernel API used by the two above. This API might be accessible by third party developers. This part, however, are not of the highest priority at present. They each take a different approach and have different security clearances.
Umbraco E-Commerce Options
There are a couple of different umbraco e-commerce options started, but few that are finished. Some are wholly new programs, while others are umbraco interfaces on top of existing e-commerce solutions.
This thread is to discuss them, and how we can get more finished e-commerce packages available.
Known Options
uCommerce - http://www.ucommerce.dk - commercial - complete
Commerce4Umbraco - http://commerce4umbraco.codeplex.com - open source, beta
Umbraco Ecommerce Extension - http://umbracoecommerce.codeplex.com/ - open source, beta
Procure - http://procure.codeplex.com/ - open source, development
uCommerce is a great enterprise solution, feature complete and under active improvement. Easily recommendable if there is the budget to purchase a solution.
Goal here is to discuss the completeness of the open source solutions, and what it would take to get at least one reasonable offering that is free to use with umbraco.
Disclaimer: I am the developer of Procure - Procure is in the early stages of development, and is a wholly new program, not based on any other e-commerce solution.
Scott -
Thanks for starting this thread! I've used umbraco with e-commerce for over two-years and can say that creating a full-featured, complete, and user friendly solution is a challenge indeed. Obviously, the folks at uCommerce have invested a large amount of time and money in their product and are offering it as a commercial package - as they should! My goal, over nearly the entire past two-years, has been to finish the Commerce for Umbraco project to the point where someone can just download the bits, install it, and start selling. There are a few instances where the planets have aligned and this has actually happened, so I know its possible.
Creating a vialble e-commerce solution is hard, really hard - just ask the uCommerce guys - so I'd hate to see yet another project get started and not get completed. IMO, this will further dilute the limited resources the community has for these projects.
So my suggestion is this: consider using the API level code from C4U to cover at least some of the arcane portions of a a commerce system (say payment provider, shipping provider, tax provider, discount, promotion, etc...). Then use your umbraco know-how to complete the front-end stuff; products, layout, templates, etc.... C4U is MIT licensed so you can just grab what's there and go crazy.
C4U also has some patches which have been submitted and are pending review which address many of the reported issues - if you're game for this I'll add you as a project dev and you can (again) use what's there.
Well, there's a start to the discussion...see where it goes from here.
-Paul
Hi Paul,
What code does C4L use originally? I was under the impression that it was using another .NET eCommerce system?
Thanks,
Scott
Yes, it is based on dashCommerce v2.2, but has been optimized for the umbraco runtime.
Incidentally, there is a discussion ongoing around updating the core bits to dashCommerce 3.* as the project's owner has granted Commerce for Umbraco an MIT license for this.
-Paul
Paul/anyone, do you know any URLs of live uCommerce sites? I would like to see what the checkout/shopping experience looks like.
Thanks,
Nik
Hi Nik,
Contact http://ucommerce.dk/ You can get a developer license for free and I thought they have an example project not 100% sure though.
Cheers,
Richard
Just to pitch in, the Umbraco Ecommerce Extension has not been touched for a long long time, and I am not sure if anyone have used it with V4. So unless someone wants to spend a lot of time getting into the code, I would probably not go with that.
As Paul says, e-commerce is a very complex thing to build from scratch, and i think that is why there are not tons of packages around for this purpose. It is complex enough when just building for one certain customer, but when trying to make it work for everyone, you will have you hands full.
But I do see the market for the ultra simple shop/basket, if it is possible to narrow down the feature list.
Is the dashCommerce project still active? It looks like their website has been purposely taken down....
I wanted to take a look at the scope of the Umbraco implementaiton versus the standalone dashCommerce framework.
I am one of the few people still using Umbraco commerce extensions, even in V4, but there is considerable amount of work there to make it anything like a finished package. It is very inefficient with regards database calls in the admin section. I was too far in to the build of a clients site before I realised how much was not quite right.
Where I do feel it works well even if not in terms of code quality is how you can create a product doc type and use umbraco how it's meant to be used for presentaiton. Each product is a page/node in Umbraco and so you get the full use of niceurls and XSLT. The extension has a simple datatype which effectively is just a usercontrol to edit the product data in the 4 database tables.
The products are linked 1:1 with the content node which to me is a massive win because I sell Umbraco qualities mainly on SEO and nice URLs are a big part of this. As far as I can see this is better than uCommerce and commerce4umbraco as they have one product page and load the data based on productIds passed in the querystring. (Having a product in more than one category though in the Umbraco content tree causes a few headaches but it is possible to overcome)
I'm actually positive that a well written datatype could store all the data in the doc types but going down this route means starting from scratch.
If I/we can look at pulling Commerce4Umbraco product editing into an Umbraco datatype, improve the XSLT extenstions to allow full control of the e-commerce engine from presentation to payment processing I think we will start to see a very good product.
DC.
Hi, reading the wise posts here, and about "ultra simple shop/basket" I came to think about google checkout, and I'd like to know the status of http://our.umbraco.org/projects/google-checkout-for-umbraco by Paul Marden, project page says it's for umbraco 3.0.3 but the project was created 2009.09.16 according to http://our.umbraco.org/projects/google-checkout-for-umbraco, so I dunno.
So a little about how I came to this point - a year ago I went looking for an eCommerce option for Umbraco to use in conjunction with one of our clients sites. I tried Commerce4Umbraco, and also the Umbraco eCommerce extensions. I looked around for other options, but uCommerce wasn't out yet at that point. We ended up creating the functionality we needed from scratch, and it wasn't something that we would be able to use again.
Recently, another client needed an eCommerce solution, and again we looked. This time, uCommerce was available, but we weren't able to use it due to the cost (it is very much worth the cost, we just didn't need the full feature set). Again, we ended up creating the functionality we needed from scratch, and again (due to some exceptionally custom checkout steps mostly) it wasn't something that we would be able to use again.
Since I personally was getting tired of coding the same solution over again, I started work personally planning out what would be needed for a super-simple product management/cart/checkout system that I could reuse each time.
See, my original goal for Procure was the simple shop/basket model that Morten was talking about. I didn't have any dreams of shipping (beyond static per-item), gift card management, coupons, etc - simply for the reason that those things are hard, and take a lot of time to make flexible for everyone to use. Sure, I thought a version release+1 might include those features if someone else would like to contribute, or I had time later... but my initial plans didn't/don't include those.
Now, since Paul has generously offered up existing code that does these, it is something I've thought about over the weekend. If I did add some of those features, I would definitely want to use the existing functionality that Commerce has implemented. I'm not wanting to reimplement the wheel here - I just want something that works easily.
My design goals are/were:
- The admin system should feel like a natural part umbraco, not terribly unlike how Media works.
- The system should not limit a product to be defined in a node.
- Products should be able to be linked to many nodes.
- Developers should be able to pull data out of the system naturally like they would from Umbraco - via XSLT if desired, or via UserControls if needed.
- It should install as a package, and EASILY.
- It would be best if the payment subsytem could use an existing interface definition so that some existing payment processor systems could be used, and not coded specifically for this eCommerce system.
Anyway, that's the state of where I am at - and I definitely don't want to dilute any efforts that others have made and/or are making.Unfortunately I do not have anything of real benefit to add apart from that I am very interested in where this goes because I have just come out of a team meeting where I have been asked to look into the e-commerce options within Umbraco because we want to setup an e-commerce site for ourselves and possibly for some of our customers. I was asked to look into whether it is possible to do so within Umbraco which it seems at the moment it is if you are willing to pay for it (ucommerce) or if you want to do a lot of work trying to fix bugs (the other beta products)!
We're actually in early stages of an enterprise e-commerce solution as well. It's an iterative process and will take time. But, like Scott mentions above, it's a sticky situation as we don't want to necessarily step on anyone's toes either. What does the community think about this sort of thing? I.e. competitive packages whether they are free or commercial?
Thanks for your input.
-- Nik
Competition is never a bad thing, in my opinion. For example there seems to be a small boost of search options for umbraco, and that seems to improve all the options rather than hurt anyone.
I'd like to reopen this discussion if possible, hopefully this is not too 'off-topic'
We're looking at rebuilding my clients existing .net bespoke E-Commerce solution (built by us) the cart currently works well but the costs to my client are growing every time they want to add new features (coupon codes, user ratings, order tracking etc.) and being bespoke the application takes a lot of our unpaid time to support.
So we're now considering 3rd party options and checking out uCommerce now (though I'm not sure the client will enjoy the cost) but we would love to keep it all in Umbraco.
We're also going to look at AspDotNetStoreFront, we have no experience of this but it's been developed over a number of years, has a rich feature set and is relatively cheap.
The current e-commerce site also has a CMS section which brings me to the question.
Does anyone have any experience /opinions in integrating Umbraco with 3rd party Shopping Carts?
This may offer us a good solution, having the shop on a sub domain and the rest of the site running umbraco, we can then pull products as we need directly into the Umbraco site of things from the AspDotNetStoreFront database (for example).
Would be interested to hear your opinions in this type of integration compared to a 'true' Umbraco solution.
Rich
I wondered if the mention of AspDotNetStoreFront might kill this thread!
Would be really interested to hear about peoples e-commerce solutions, pure Umbraco, a mix, or just straight .NET.
What are people using?
Rich
There's just an enourmous gap in the market here I reckon. .NET is screaming out for an app like Magento. When I last checked (about 4 months ago) I couldn't find a single decent open source shopping cart for .NET, which was flexible enough to handle things like subscriptions and multiple payment gateways. I've only ever used bespoke .NET carts, and haven't ever tried to integrate one of those with Umbraco. That doesn't help I'm sure, but I thought I'd put my two cents in since I've struggled with this myself in the past!
Appreciate the reply Dan, at least I know I'm not alone! Agree there is a gap in the market
To be honest it doesn't even need to be open source. Personally I don't think my client will pay for uCommerce + my dev time to integrate it, they would probably pay for ASPDOTNETStoreFront but I hear their support is terrible, the code doesn't validate and worst of all they delete any negative messages from their forums. Not a company I feel like dealing with.
I know this isn't a strictly Umbraco conversation but I'd be really interested to hear of successful Umbraco / eCommerce integrations as I think it's the only thing that it lacks right now.
I know people are working hard the open source route and I don't want to sound negative, it's just I have a client waiting to pay for a solution and am struggling to offer a lowish cost solution that delivers the feature set they need.
I'm going to have another look at nopcommerce today, doesn't look like a very mature product and the last release was way back in June
Any others I should consider?
Thanks for listening!
Rich
I wanted to chime in on this conversation as it is, as you can probably imagine, very interesting to me and the uCommerce team :)
We're aware that cost is an issue for a certain segment of the Umbraco market and we're addressing that very issue with uCommerce Starter Edition, which is in the works at the moment. uCommerce Starter is a subset of uCommerce Pro and will support a straight forward upgrade to Pro should the need arise.
A uCommerce Starter license will cost approximately half that of a Pro license - 1,695 EUR - and would support your typical single shop, cart, checkout scenario and still leave room to upgrade should your client need more functionality, but even more importantly it will have all the extension points of the Pro edition.
We're still in the process of finalizing uCommerce Starter Edition and I'd appreciate any input you might have on pricing and feature set.
Sounds like a good idea, i created an e-commerce site recently. Your suggested addition would have been an easier pitch to my client. So at least you get your foot in the door, whilst having a clear upgrade path.
Hi Soren,
A starter edition of uCommerce sounds fantastic and a great way to build a community around the product too.
It would certainly be an easier sell for me, I'd be interested in what the feature set is.
I haven't had time to fully research uCommerce but here is what my client requires
@Rich: All the features you list are supported by uCommerce Starter Edition except the coupon codes. We're working on getting our marketing foundation ready but for now you have to roll something yourself using our pipeline system - see the following link for an explanation of how to do it http://blog.lasseeskildsen.net/post/uCommerce-Pipelines-Explained.aspx.
Hi Søren and other interested,
I think it's very hard to set the right price for products and especially software. A professor I had at University once designed a lamp, which was designed with low-cost manufacturing in mind, as he wanted to make beautiful designs for the masses that everybody could afford. The retail price was about 15 euro, but hardly any was sold. After a year on the market a friend had an idea about raising the price to 150 euro, and suddenly the lamp sold much better…
Without anything to back it up, I personally think that it’s kind of the opposite with software, as it’s not a lifestyle product, but a technical product, which is sold by features, usability, extensibility, stability etc. I’m not at ALL saying that software relying on free/low-cost OS software like umbraco should be free, but that the price matters even more.
I know there has been put A LOT of hours into making uCommerce, and that it’s an investment that hopefully over time will give a better payoff than the invested time. As I see the pricing of uCommerce it’s set so high, that it’s mainly aimed at bigger agencies (Vertica, Creuna etc.), which typical has clients with larger budgets where the software price matters less. This has the advantage, that the solutions always (hopefully :-) are of higher standard and good references for uCommerce.
But at the same time the price of uCommerce cuts off the majority of umbraco developers/clients from buying it. I believe that if uCommerce (both pro and starter kit) was half the price, it would sell a lot more than double. It will be much easier to build a community around your product (see umbraco), as there are more developers/users using the software, and at the same time the software will be more ‘proven’ and well know, which makes it easier to convince clients to use.
uCommerce already has the software, but from my point of view the price keeps it from being ‘THE’ ecommerce solution for umbraco. Considering the number of umbraco solutions worldwide, I believe the market for the right ecommerce solution build on umbraco – at the RIGHT price is HUGE…
Have a nice weekend!
@horsted - I certainly understand that some clients won't want to pay the price it costs for uCommerce Pro, or uCommerce starter edition. I also work with some very small businesses that have trouble meeting a $500 budget for their whole website, let alone a $5,000 budget for just one component.
With that said though, in my opinion uCommerce isn't overpriced. This only becomes more apparent with the release of their Starter Edition.
I think a lot of small businesses want more than they can afford. There is so much OSS out there, that frequently we are able to give them more than they can afford, but in the case of eCommerce this hasn't been the case. There are some things out there that you can try, and possibly get to work - Commerce4Umbraco is an example of that - but it (the process, not c4u specifically) can be difficult. It can be very hard to have a small business grasp an understanding the cost of what they want. And the frustrating part can be that if you do it outside of Umbraco, it could even be possible to do what they want on the budget they need.
I've tried to keep this in mind when developing Procure - a focus on what a business might need, and not what they might want. Procure is (so far) really very simple. It holds maintains products, it allows you to add them to your cart. It will hopefully soon let you check out. It has an exceptionally simplistic view of shipping right now, and that's not likely to change in the near future.
This is far and beyond the main reason that I have maintained that Procure is not in competion with uCommerce - it is a complimentary product. If a business needs more than Procure provides, and still doesn't have the budget to purchase something that can provide those things - perhaps the business has undervalued their website.
Of course, Procure is open source, so anyone may feel free to contribute any feature they feel is a business need, and not just a want.
Procure will be an introduction to e-commerce edition in my opinion, and if a company needs more, or grows into a need for more, then that is when I see they will want to move on to something more robust; like uCommerce. My ultimate hope is that I can design Procure well enough that we can make that an easy upgrade.
Procure is available for code review at http://procure.codeplex.com/ - please note that there is no release or package available yet as I am still in very active early development. You would need quite a bit of know-how to even attempt running it - I haven't even got a database sql file uploaded yet. I'll try to get a bit more documentation up on the website soon so that people can give suggestions as to how the XSLT is working out. I can't emphasize enough how much I value people's feedback and ideas with this project.
Hope I haven't wasted too much of people's time with this post :)
@Scott, interesting discussion. I (like you) don't think uCommerce is overpriced, and I didn't write my comment because I personally need an ecommerce solution, and hope to get uCommerce at half price :-)
My main point is that I believe there today is a huge unfulfilled market for a mature out of the box ecommerce solution for umbraco in an affordable price range. As uCommerce is the first player with an oob cart for umbraco, they have a big advantage and are in a position, where they can take a large part of the market. It would take a reduction in their current prices, but in the end I think the bottom line figures would be bigger, as a lot more licenses would be sold.
As I see it, the first mature, well-featured and easy-to-install ecommerce solution with at the right price could more or less make the other solutions obsolete. With uCommerce aiming at the high-end, the ‘masses’-market is left open for others, and it’s exciting to see what happens when the promising OOS products come out of beta…
I’ll sure be checking out Procure, when needing a ecommerce solution, thanks!
Hey guys
I though i'd just jump in the discussion about uCommerce. I have launched several websites now using uCommerce, and the there are certainly pros and cons. The pros are pretty clear when looking at the features that uCommerce has to offer. It's pretty extendable and it's rather easy to makt it fit you needs.
However, I experience some serious performance issues with the current 1.0 version. I have a customer who have a good 500 orders per month, and uCommerce seem to have issues handling this kind of modest load. I know that uCommerce is build upon subsonic and other non-sql friendly technologies, that makes sql performance horrible. I took the liberty of running the SQL analyser, when doing simple tasks in uCommerce. The results were frightening. When fetching ONE order through the uCommerce API, the SQL database is asked to make more than 500 queries... imagine that.
I can go on and on about the SQL part in uCommerce as I love to tune SQL performance, but I'll save that for another day.
Now I hate to be the one that ruins the party and all, but I would really not recommend uCommerce for any, but test, projects until theese performance issues have been resolved.
@Thomas: We're aware of the performance issue and are working to resolve it with upcoming versions. Version 1.0.2 which is being tested right now is addressing performance issues regarding the Catalog Foundation. The issue you mention regarding the Transaction Foundation is new to me but we'll certainly mare sure to address it for the next version.
I'd like to take this opportunity to mention that the very reason our feedback forum exists is to address any issues you might encounter with uCommerce. I'll make sure and note your concern for transactions in our internal systems now that it's come to my attention, but if you want to make absolutely sure that we pick up on your concerns in the future please report them at the uCommerce feedback forum.
Since this thread was started we release uCommerce Starter Edition, which is priced at 850€. Starter Edition is a subset of Pro, but you get the features most commonly needed for smaller shops and the ability to upgrade to Pro if you need it at some point. No data migration needed - you just enter a new key and you're good to go.
You can see a feature comparison on our ste at http://www.ucommerce.dk/en/features/compare-starter-to-pro.aspx
Developing with uCommerce is completely free of charge. You just need a license for your production site. Download Developer Edition at http://www.ucommerce.dk/en/get-it-now.aspx
Have there been any new developements with any ecommerce for umbraco solutions in the last 5 months as I am now trying to find the best solution for my clients requirements.
I was all set on using Ucommerce Starter as this thread said it was the best by far even though not free and it looked quite good, but I am having a bit of trouble trying to implement what I need and even though I really want an Umbraco solution i am on the verge of giving up and just moving to nopcommerce or something outside of Umbraco!
I've followed this thread and Umbraco e-commerce solutions, I have exactly the same needs as you as am also considering moving to nopcommerce.
http://www.supersimplewebshop.com looked good at the CodeGarden demo, however it's not released yet.
In my opinion uCommerce is too difficult/costly/time-consuming to implement for the average e-commerce site.
Seems like there's still a big gap here, if you do go down the nopcommerce route, let us know how you get on as I'm considering doing this too but using umbraco as the CMS.
Rich
Rich,
I had't heard of this new "supersimplewebshop", it says it should be realeased soon but it's only going to be a little cheaper than Ucommerce Starter and it seems with less functionailty, but that said I don't really need all the bells and whistles!
I have posted to see if I will be able to do what I want on their forum.
I think Ucommerce could be really good if it had a bit more documention, because that's what it seems to be lacking!
The support forum is quite new so not many posts as yet and the ucommerce team seem to take an age to reply to anything so getting help is very difficult!
So frustrating!
Supersimplewebshop and uCommerce are aimed at the two ends of the market IMHO.
Maybe post your exact requirements here, I can remember most the the supersimplewebshop features from their demo.
Rich
They have already replied
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/supersimplewebshop/supersimplewebshop-qa
I am impressed already!
@Bex: I'd like to point out some of the articles available about the uCommerce subsystems at http://www.ucommerce.dk/en/support/documentation.aspx . Also we're expanding the API level docs with a completely new site at http://www.ucommerce.dk/docs .
Soren, I found the ones on http://www.ucommerce.dk/en/support/documentation.aspx but they were a bit vague!
It would have been useful to know about the API docs before I started out!
We only brought the API reference online this week. I'm sorry we couldn't get it online sooner.
I'd be happy to hear your feedback on the articles - it's very much on our common interest to get rid of any and all vagueness on the docs.
You're welcome to shoot me an e-mail at [email protected] with any thoughts on how to improve the existing docs.
Seen the new e-commerce for umbraco - Tea Commerce? Its a new simple, flexsible, ecommerce system with a really nice jQuery API to make all the cart functionality - but at the same time the system is totally secure as all functions is validated by the server. If you know umbraco, it will take you little time to learn Tea Commerce.
More info at: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/tea-commerce
I've tested Tea Commerce and feel it's easier to get a store online than uCommerce is... the API has all methods you would need. The documentation is easier to follow..
Hi Daniel,
I'd love to hear more specially what we can do better with uCommerce. We're continually producing new documentation of of course would like to make them even better in the future. That said though I guess that part of the explanation that the docs for uCommerce are a bit harder to follow is that our product does more thus requiring more explanation.
Please let me know if you have any feedback at [email protected]
@Daniel I'm really glad to hear your comments - its exactly what Tea Commerce is about - making a simple, easy to learn, full feature package to make a nice looking e-commmerce solution. Glad you love the simple documentation and more will follow in the next weeks so you can read how to use member login with Tea Commerce, how to make a payment provider real simple etc.
I realize I'm jumping in to this discussion very late, but this is a particular area of interest for me.
The lack of a decent, open source ecommerce solution is a huge problem with .NET right now. There are several world class ecommerce solutions on the LAMP side of the fence (Magneto, osCommerce, Zen Cart, etc.). In my opinion there are zero for .NET (though I am going to give nopCommerce a shot).
I don't blame the folks at uCommerce or Tea for wanting to sell the code they've invested a lot of hard work in, but the reality is that most web sites aren't constructed for multi-billion dollar global corporations. They're made for very small businesses, with very small budgets. 850€ or even 350€ for a shopping cart is just too expensive for these types of projects.
The "What's the best open source .NET shopping cart" conversation was popular in 2002 when ASP.NET was brand new. It was popular in 2005 when ASP.NET 2 was released, and here we are still talking about it in 2011. And there still is no answer.
How is it that the PHP folks can pump out at least a half-dozen viable ecommerce solutions, and the .NET community can't make one?
It saddens me to think that I'm going to have to keep using the same classic ASP shopping cart my company made a decade ago because there is no viable alternative on .NET that doesn't cost $1,000 per site.
nopCommerce is the best opensource ecommerce solution for ASP.Net (the only fully opensource solution I have found for asp.net)
You'll love it and it's extendable.. being opensource.
I know that some of the community was working on Commerce4Umbraco a few years back.
TeaCommerce is not opensource, but isn't too expensive given that you are a developer and can get it working smoothly with Umbraco.
I do think that uCommerce is WAY overpriced.. but you have to understand that the market for TeaCommerce and uCommerce is much smaller being that you have to be using Umbraco, so I can understand them charging for them.
Good luck!
nopCommerce does look pretty good. They certainly seem to have the features covered, so that's probably the route I'll investigate.
It always seems to be a trade-off, doesn't it?
Some work was done by Skiltz (username) with integrating nopCommerce into Umbraco.
He mentions it here: http://skiltzonnet.blogspot.com/2010/04/nopcommerce-and-umbraco.html
and says he completed it here: http://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/3186/integration-cmsbannerfidelity-programspaymenttaxes-shipping.aspx
I can't seem to get a hold of him about it.
As far as WordPress features, the Umbraco Canvas should be sufficient. It allows in-page editing of content.
I got a hold of skiltz... He hasn't worked on the integration of nop and umbraco in a while.
He sent me a link to the source. You can see what you can do with it.
http://agentx.info/umbnop.zip
The new Tea Commerce website is only - lots of info about the product and documentation
http://www.teacommerce.dk
Hi,
Is there a demo site or live site, preferably in Italian language, that run on of the e-commerce extensions for Umbraco?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Pietro
You can find a demo site for Tea Commerce at http://demo.teacommerce.dk/ - In english
Hi Anders,
Thank for your quick reply, I have taken a look at TeaCommerce Demo a few days ago and it seems to fit my requirements. Is it fully localizable in IT-it language?
Thanks.
Hi Pietro,
Rather than looking at demos you might want to take a look at some production sites to get an idea of what's possible with uCommerce.
Here are a couple live ones for you to play around with - we've got a single Italian site running, but it's done in English as well.
www.chalkboardsuk.co.uk
www.indigoflash.co.uk
www.thevic.dk
www.quer-bags.de
www.gsneo.org
www.scout-retail.com
If you want to play around with uCommerce yourself you can set up uCommerce 2.0 in two minutes using Web Platform Installer and uCommerce. uCommerce TV has a couple of videos, which show you how to get it going.
You might be interested to learn that we released uCommerce Free Edition at Codegarden 11. Basically it will get a production site up and running on a great platform at no cost at all. It's basically the version we used to call uCommerce Starter Edition, which supports selling in a market.
Cheers.
What you want to use it the Tea Commerce Starter Kit insted of the demo webshop.
http://www.teacommerce.dk/en/products/tea-commerce-starter-kit.aspx
It gives you a really good starting point for developing your webshop and it shoudl be easy to replace the english texts with your text and put a simple design on top of it.
If you need help - feel free to ask and I will try and help :)
Considering the original topic regarding Open Sourced Ecommerce Solutions for Umbraco, I have top conclude after 5 pages that there are none that work out of the box.
If I was lucky enough to land a big budget site I would consider uCommerce or TeaCommerce, however like learning a CMS that is open source it may be "free" to download and use but the time and effort you put in to learn a new system is not free.
I have invested a huge amount of time in umbraco CMS and for that reason I won't be changing CMSs any time soon. Its the same for a ecommerce solution. You invest in the product and learn it and provide feedback etc. If I have to cough £1500 and spend a whole bunch of time learning it too then I am not sure I would make any money (for the first few sites anyway).
I am looking for an ecommerce module for Umbraco too and have tested a few so called open source solutions. However if you have to put up with a banner logo then it (for the most part) simply won't do. I'll have to stick with my asp.net shopping cart code I wrote 3 years ago.
On a positive note, I am not a slick whizz bang whollop developer as many of you are, but I would be happy to contribute some time to develop such a package for Umbraco.
Like most umbraco packages there will always be some kind of work included to get it working. Some packages more than others. Ecommerce packages are quite large systems and can be complex, but as you stated your self - it will take time to learn the first times, but then it gets easier and you can do the sites in less time.
I know that the commerce4umbraco - http://commerce4umbraco.codeplex.com/ - project is still alive and is open source and free. You could ask Jason - http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/protherj - about more info of the project and its possibilities.
One alternative to the umbraco packages is an integration with nopCommerce. I've just started experimenting with this, and it's looking very promising so far. See also this topic: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/developers/extending-umbraco/14140-If-interested-please-vote-for-NopCommerce-feature?p=1
You're quite right that there's no such thing as completely free.
I would, however, point out an interesting trend I'm seeing among the uCommerce partners who have invested in learning to use it. Basically what's happening is that they are able to land bigger/different projects than before becuase they are able to expand their business to include new and different business opportunities. Of course the tool alone doesn't do it, but it does help you get started. It will in some instances even open up for new oppotunities as new prospects are starting to ask for e-commerce solution, specifically on Umbraco.
Store managers contact us on a regular basis asking for a partner to help them with their uCommerce implementation and I personally take great pleasure in redirecting prospects to our partners helping them with a bit of business, especially because they've seen fit to spend the time and effort to use our tools. That's what makes a great eco-system in my opinion :)
I guess what I'm trying to say that you can see the situation as either an expenditure or an investment. There will be an upfront investment, but I'm seeing a tenfold return on it; in our partner network at least.
Hope this helps.
Hi
Its my first day with Umbraco, so checking what all I can do with and e-commerce is must have.
Just checked the site http://www.ucommerce.dk/en/home.aspx it says uCommerce 2.0 is here... And it's free!
So may be good news for all of us.
Sudipta Banerjee
The project is called Tea Commerce and is a plug-in to Umbraco using JavaScript to access an e-sales API on the server, the plug-in consists of three parts.
• An extensive JavaScript API and related server REST API
• An xslt library for Umbraco
• A server kernel API used by the two above. This API might be accessible by third party developers. This part, however, are not of the highest priority at present.
They each take a different approach and have different security clearances.
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Best E-commerce solution
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