can anyone tell me what the status of this project is?
looking at the website it appears to be a live commercial offering with some recent releases etc.
but their appears to be little documentation, very little community interaction and i've had what i presume to be a trivial support question open on the forum for a day without response from the vendor.
I'm not "having a go" as it where, i understand that these type of projects (commercial or otherwise) often involve a very small team and demand quite a lot of time, i just want to ascertain whether its actually someones (or even better some peoples) "day job" to maintain the product and respond to support requests from the community etc.
My company is committed to provide ecommerce solutions to out clients using the umbraco platform, i just need to make sure that we can make a learning curve investment in ucommerce safe in the knowledge that it is going to be arround for a while.
In fact we probably have enough technical resource to help maintain it if the ucommerce core team is struggling with the demands of the project - i'm sure it would be more cost effective than rolling our own.
they do look like they done a decent amount of work, the product does look good, they just seem a little conspicuous by their absence on the support forum. I took a look at their uservoice forum, i'm familier with this as a few of our client use it, as Nauman points out, its more designed for soliciting product development input fronm customers rather than giving support.
but anyway thanks for the reply, its nice to know their are other people out there interested in the product
uCommerce is by no means abadon abandonware. For some reason our feature request forum is not used a lot. We continue to monitor the forum and pick up the highest voted features for implementation in the product.
The forum here has more activity but is still quite new. We continue to encourage our partners to use this forum to get answers to any questions, but e-mail still receives quite a lot of traffic.
Vacation accounts for the low activity in the forums during the past two weeks. At the moment not a lot of people are familiar enough with uCommerce to provide replies in this forum so most of the activity is generated by the founders. We do have to charge up the batteries from time to time so vacation alas is required for us to continue our work.
The situation will remedy itself as developers become more familiar with the product and as we add devs to our own team. (Actually introducing a new dev to the team tomorrow :)).
Oh and we just released a new version fixing a couple of issues found with the Umbraco 4.5 compatibility. Download it from www.ucommerce.dk/en/get-it-now.aspx. Release note available as well.
I echo Andy's comments; we're also looking to standardise our ecommerce solution, preferably Umbraco based, but I'm struggling to see enough momentum in uCommerce at the moment.
It looks like a great foundation (excuse the pun!) upon which to build a store, but it's just that it seems - a box of bits to screw together on your own. Yes, I know there's an example store, but it's pretty light on real-world features, and the docs consist of half a dozen blog posts and a comprehensive API reference.
What's missing is the bit in-between - how to broadly get from the demo store, to a "proper" fully-functional store, without too much really low-level stuff. I'm comfortable with Umbraco and C#, but I'd rather not have to digest the full API just to know how to screw together a standard site.
As it stands, I'm finding it hard to recommend uCommerce; I want to, but just don't feel safe enough doing so.
Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and formulate your thoughts about on product. Rest assured that we are working on addressing the points you make.
Not to be gruff about it but I guess we have very different definitions of momentum. Just this week we did a major release of uCommerce (version 1.1) which introduces native payment providers for a number of payment gateways including the much requested PayPal provider. We're following up on that shortly with another release (1.1.1) which adds another batch of providers for UK gateways (SagePay, WorldPay, and PayEx) and some Swedish ones.
Even before that we continually rolled out releases - at least one each month. We're dedicated to bring more value to new and existing customers alike. I personally feel that creating new release at a fairly rapid pace to incorporate partner feedback is the way to do it.
Even more importantly new uCommerce sites are rolling out at a pretty incredible pace, which has only accelerated. This month alone has seen 10 new sites until this point, the latest one being http://en.lightyears.dk. The best part about it is that sites are coming online in Germany, the US, the UK, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy so we're seeing pretty broad adoption of uCommerce as a platform.
You do have a point about the demo store. It wasn't meant for production but rather a go between until we got more documentation together. It serves primarily as a way to show new adopters of uCommerce how to use the APIs as such it's more like a living document than anything else.
Rest assured that we are working on bringing a better demo store to our partners. In fact we're working on not one but two new demo stores; one of which created by the talented folks at Udbrud - in fact it's a real production site that've made an agreement with the store owner and Udbrud to adopt as our new demo store. This means that you'll have a fully production ready store as part of your uCommerce toolbox.
I'd like to hear more about the kind of documentation you'd like to see. We rolled out the latest release with full documentation of the new features (doc, doc, doc) and we plan on keeping doing that with each new release.
Finally I'd like to point out that we are available to help when you need us; through the forum, e-mail, and of course via online meetings if you really need us. Rest assured that we want to see your project succeed as much as you do.
But don't take my word for it. I'd be happy to set you up with contact information for a couple of our existing partners so you can have chat about how it is to work with us once a project starts. I feel confident that they'll tell quite a different story than what your impression is right now.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply; the depth of your reply alone is highly reassuring at least.
Perhaps 'momentum' was the wrong word for me to use; there's certainly plenty of activity as you say, and my apologies for perhaps not explaining my concerns well enough.
With that in mind, I should expand on my primary concern;
"What's missing is the bit in-between - how to broadly get from the demo store, to a "proper" fully-functional store, without too much really low-level stuff. I'm comfortable with Umbraco and C#, but I'd rather not have to digest the full API just to know how to screw together a standard site."
A more fully-featured demo store will go a long way towards this; a working reference implementation is worth way more than pages of manuals and reference docs. Please don't feel you have to deliver a ready-to-launch shop though - too many products fall into delivering a "shop in a box", that it then becomes too hard to customise beyond choosing a pre-built skin and inserting a logo.
Not doing this is what attracts me most to uCommerce; I love the toolkit approach (it's why I love Umbraco), but I just need to see where and how to screw the parts together. I don't want to know how to customise a demo store; I just want to see how it's built, so I can build my own. In much the same way as Warren's CWS taught us how to get started with Umbraco, a reference shop would help so much with uCommerce.
Similarly, the API docs are equally priceless, but only at a later point in the process. Perhaps there's too much emphasis currently on documenting the low-level stuff; it's great to know that's all there, but I don't need it just yet - and without being able to get past the first hurdle, we'll never get as far as needing the more detailed stuff.
Lastly, I'd love to chat with someone who's been though this, so yes please, do put me in touch with someone to chat to about this...
I can assure you, that Søren and Lasse are doing quite a good support, even before you buy a license. Indeed, documentation consists out of some blog posts, forum answers and documents. And yes, you will have to spent some time in investigating the demo store and API. But the technology behind UCommerce is pretty clever and nice. I needed to extent UCommerce with SAP interfaces and my own payment providers. To be honest, it took some time and lot of mails to Søren, but I'm very happy with the result. It's clean, extensible and fully integrated into Umbraco, just what I wanted.
@Phil: Thanks for clarifying. Am I reading your post right in that what you're really looking for is more general documentation on building an e-commerce site using uCommerce? E.g. docs that describe how an initial browse flow works, the checkout flow, customer self-service, etc?
@Christian: Thanks for your kind words. I really appreciate that.
Is Ucommerce now Abandonware?
Hi,
can anyone tell me what the status of this project is?
looking at the website it appears to be a live commercial offering with some recent releases etc.
but their appears to be little documentation, very little community interaction and i've had what i presume to be a trivial support question open on the forum for a day without response from the vendor.
I'm not "having a go" as it where, i understand that these type of projects (commercial or otherwise) often involve a very small team and demand quite a lot of time, i just want to ascertain whether its actually someones (or even better some peoples) "day job" to maintain the product and respond to support requests from the community etc.
My company is committed to provide ecommerce solutions to out clients using the umbraco platform, i just need to make sure that we can make a learning curve investment in ucommerce safe in the knowledge that it is going to be arround for a while.
In fact we probably have enough technical resource to help maintain it if the ucommerce core team is struggling with the demands of the project - i'm sure it would be more cost effective than rolling our own.
can anyone give me some insight?
thanks
Andy
I believe that they are doing a decent amount of work: http://www.ucommerce.dk/en/home.aspx, it looks like they have their own forum: http://ucommerce.uservoice.com/forums/23685-ucommerce.
Seth
The forum you mentioned is for the feedback purpose. i am unable to find much on this forum.
Nauman
Hi Seth,
they do look like they done a decent amount of work, the product does look good, they just seem a little conspicuous by their absence on the support forum. I took a look at their uservoice forum, i'm familier with this as a few of our client use it, as Nauman points out, its more designed for soliciting product development input fronm customers rather than giving support.
but anyway thanks for the reply, its nice to know their are other people out there interested in the product
Andy
Hi guys,
uCommerce is by no means abadon abandonware. For some reason our feature request forum is not used a lot. We continue to monitor the forum and pick up the highest voted features for implementation in the product.
The forum here has more activity but is still quite new. We continue to encourage our partners to use this forum to get answers to any questions, but e-mail still receives quite a lot of traffic.
Vacation accounts for the low activity in the forums during the past two weeks. At the moment not a lot of people are familiar enough with uCommerce to provide replies in this forum so most of the activity is generated by the founders. We do have to charge up the batteries from time to time so vacation alas is required for us to continue our work.
The situation will remedy itself as developers become more familiar with the product and as we add devs to our own team. (Actually introducing a new dev to the team tomorrow :)).
I hope you understand :)
Oh and we just released a new version fixing a couple of issues found with the Umbraco 4.5 compatibility. Download it from www.ucommerce.dk/en/get-it-now.aspx. Release note available as well.
Hi Guys, thanks for the responses, understand entirely about vacations etc and the "newness" of the forum, i was just looking for some reassurance
thanks
Andy
I echo Andy's comments; we're also looking to standardise our ecommerce solution, preferably Umbraco based, but I'm struggling to see enough momentum in uCommerce at the moment.
It looks like a great foundation (excuse the pun!) upon which to build a store, but it's just that it seems - a box of bits to screw together on your own. Yes, I know there's an example store, but it's pretty light on real-world features, and the docs consist of half a dozen blog posts and a comprehensive API reference.
What's missing is the bit in-between - how to broadly get from the demo store, to a "proper" fully-functional store, without too much really low-level stuff. I'm comfortable with Umbraco and C#, but I'd rather not have to digest the full API just to know how to screw together a standard site.
As it stands, I'm finding it hard to recommend uCommerce; I want to, but just don't feel safe enough doing so.
Phil
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and formulate your thoughts about on product. Rest assured that we are working on addressing the points you make.
Not to be gruff about it but I guess we have very different definitions of momentum. Just this week we did a major release of uCommerce (version 1.1) which introduces native payment providers for a number of payment gateways including the much requested PayPal provider. We're following up on that shortly with another release (1.1.1) which adds another batch of providers for UK gateways (SagePay, WorldPay, and PayEx) and some Swedish ones.
Even before that we continually rolled out releases - at least one each month. We're dedicated to bring more value to new and existing customers alike. I personally feel that creating new release at a fairly rapid pace to incorporate partner feedback is the way to do it.
Even more importantly new uCommerce sites are rolling out at a pretty incredible pace, which has only accelerated. This month alone has seen 10 new sites until this point, the latest one being http://en.lightyears.dk. The best part about it is that sites are coming online in Germany, the US, the UK, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy so we're seeing pretty broad adoption of uCommerce as a platform.
You do have a point about the demo store. It wasn't meant for production but rather a go between until we got more documentation together. It serves primarily as a way to show new adopters of uCommerce how to use the APIs as such it's more like a living document than anything else.
Rest assured that we are working on bringing a better demo store to our partners. In fact we're working on not one but two new demo stores; one of which created by the talented folks at Udbrud - in fact it's a real production site that've made an agreement with the store owner and Udbrud to adopt as our new demo store. This means that you'll have a fully production ready store as part of your uCommerce toolbox.
I'd like to hear more about the kind of documentation you'd like to see. We rolled out the latest release with full documentation of the new features (doc, doc, doc) and we plan on keeping doing that with each new release.
Finally I'd like to point out that we are available to help when you need us; through the forum, e-mail, and of course via online meetings if you really need us. Rest assured that we want to see your project succeed as much as you do.
But don't take my word for it. I'd be happy to set you up with contact information for a couple of our existing partners so you can have chat about how it is to work with us once a project starts. I feel confident that they'll tell quite a different story than what your impression is right now.
Hope this helps.
Søren,
Thanks for the comprehensive reply; the depth of your reply alone is highly reassuring at least.
Perhaps 'momentum' was the wrong word for me to use; there's certainly plenty of activity as you say, and my apologies for perhaps not explaining my concerns well enough.
With that in mind, I should expand on my primary concern;
"What's missing is the bit in-between - how to broadly get from the demo store, to a "proper" fully-functional store, without too much really low-level stuff. I'm comfortable with Umbraco and C#, but I'd rather not have to digest the full API just to know how to screw together a standard site."
A more fully-featured demo store will go a long way towards this; a working reference implementation is worth way more than pages of manuals and reference docs. Please don't feel you have to deliver a ready-to-launch shop though - too many products fall into delivering a "shop in a box", that it then becomes too hard to customise beyond choosing a pre-built skin and inserting a logo.
Not doing this is what attracts me most to uCommerce; I love the toolkit approach (it's why I love Umbraco), but I just need to see where and how to screw the parts together. I don't want to know how to customise a demo store; I just want to see how it's built, so I can build my own. In much the same way as Warren's CWS taught us how to get started with Umbraco, a reference shop would help so much with uCommerce.
Similarly, the API docs are equally priceless, but only at a later point in the process. Perhaps there's too much emphasis currently on documenting the low-level stuff; it's great to know that's all there, but I don't need it just yet - and without being able to get past the first hurdle, we'll never get as far as needing the more detailed stuff.
Lastly, I'd love to chat with someone who's been though this, so yes please, do put me in touch with someone to chat to about this...
Phil
I can assure you, that Søren and Lasse are doing quite a good support, even before you buy a license. Indeed, documentation consists out of some blog posts, forum answers and documents. And yes, you will have to spent some time in investigating the demo store and API. But the technology behind UCommerce is pretty clever and nice. I needed to extent UCommerce with SAP interfaces and my own payment providers. To be honest, it took some time and lot of mails to Søren, but I'm very happy with the result. It's clean, extensible and fully integrated into Umbraco, just what I wanted.
Hope this helps.
Christian
@Phil: Thanks for clarifying. Am I reading your post right in that what you're really looking for is more general documentation on building an e-commerce site using uCommerce? E.g. docs that describe how an initial browse flow works, the checkout flow, customer self-service, etc?
@Christian: Thanks for your kind words. I really appreciate that.
Søren,
Yes, that sounds very much like the sort of docs needed; a more general overview than the existing API docs.
Once I understand it myself, I'd be happy to even contribute towards editing it ;-)
Phil
Great. They're on my todo list.
I certainly appreciate the offer to help out. Thanks a bunch :)
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