I want to share a couple of things I've learned over time regarding DotNetNuke and eCommerce and it might surprise some people, as it did me, when I came to my final conclusion after reading post after post on the mothership forums, working with eCommerce myself over the last few years and really analysing solutions that my clients are asking for.

I personally think that the most difficult infrastructure to setup for clients is eCommerce.  I know there are off the shelf solutions, we use them ourselves.  We don't have any proprietary shopping cart code - I did have in the early days, in asp but felt that at the time, the amount of ecommerce solutions being requested, in relation to the wages paid to get it going and sustain it, simply didn't add up.  And we had a fantastic ecommerce solution that, back in 2000, integrated with our original email marketing solution, so you could up sell and cross sell to clients after the fact, and at a click of a button.

However, I learnt that being a visionary was only good if you could get the followers to believe AND the technology to manage and sustain it.   There were very, very few companies in 2000 that had the capabilities to even get their products into some sort of format that was useable online.

We're way past that now - with research stating that if we think there are plenty of shops online now - it's going to double in the next 4 years.  I am not sure who to believe, and I'm not the stats writer, but I can tell you that as we become more time poor, internet savvy, research smart and social networking skilled, we will be armed with more information to buy something from a store, IF we haven't already bought online.

Why do talk about this in relation to DotNetNuke and ecommerce?  Good question, because it leaves me to analyse our client's expectations and needs as they grow their online presence.  I thought that DNN was the best solution full stop. I could do anything with it.  There was going to be plenty of modules around that would help me and the thriving community of developers would have great inroads into building a great empire of .NET open source solutions with great third party extensions.

I have to reasses things at all times. I read through many websites, try to understand what my clients want, try to be really good at all things DNN in the capacity of skills that we have, and I have to, for the first time ever, admit that in the future, if someone just wants an ecommerce site with nothing on it, I'm probably not going to use DNN.  I will use a third party standalone shop and shock horror, it will be most likely magento ecommerce.  And it's a PHP solution, which although I have tried very hard to support the .NET solutions, I have to consider my clients and their requirements, over and above my passion for DNN.

Why not Catalook?? - I love this product - it's not the prettiest, but it's incredibly rock solid - I have to give it that - for example I've updated this website for a client.  We did it back in 2005 with an old old version of Catalook on a DNN 3.1.1. build - wow, so long ago.  And, it took us months to do, firstly I had paid a developer thousands to write a store for me, but that was like throwing water onto an oil fire - talk about burning your money... But to be fair, DNN was still fairly new.   However, with Catalook we were able, very quickly at the end, build the site, and more than that - give management to the client who had modified their access database and had seamless integration of data between the store and the site.  So, 4 years later, new site, do we use Catalook again?  Well, I was incredibly impressed when, after mucking around with 50 spreadsheets of data, remixing and redoing categories, image, image paths, and working with an mdb file that was 4 years old, when I finally updated the clients mdb file, first time, it worked, flawlessly.   You have to understand for me that was such a relief. It had been such a difficult job that required us to use a bit of trickery and DNN knowledge to create some illusions and results the client asked for, all without custom coding.  Although we modified the skin ascx files and css files, we didn't touch the core Catalook build and from my point of view, will be upgradeable without issue in the future.

I love Catalook, and will continue to use it for clients, mainly for those who want something that requires flexible choices on how an ecommerce solution is delivered and is rock solid day after day, once it's setup correctly.  And if they want more out of a site apart from a straght selling environment. 

HOWEVER, now we're going to look at when I may look at other options apart from Catalook - it's when a customer wants a straight store, they can manage themselves, no real site content, no blogs, no forums, no announcements, no MIXED ecommerce and content sites.    I will choose a standalone solution that I can deliver without the headache of involving DNN itself.

DNN for me is the the ONLY choice if you want to have web, store, forums, blogs, articles, social networking, all in one package.  It's built for that - and I would choose Catalook as the solution because I know it very well, and it does for all purposes mentioned here today, work.  There are DNN ecommerce solutions, but I don't use them and I don't know them well enough and I have decided that now, after being part of DNN for close on 6 years, it's time to evaluate other solutions if all the customer wants is an ecommerce store

The reason I think this is when I go back to my first comment about ecommerce being complex. It really is.  Not on purpose mind you, but because you are taking that next step in the relationship you have with your customers, your website visitors and the products you choose to use and learn about.

It's not about pointing fingers or trying to saying it's bad, but it makes things quite complex.  We have to consider people's infrastructure, experience of the person building the website and their knowledge of eccomerce in general, the product they are using and what the client is going to give them to work with.

I have found that in general, unless someone is a larger company with inventory management, most newcomers to ecommerce will deliver you a mess - a huge mess for you to somehow make into a very cool store without a single understanding on the time involved in converting data and crappy images to something that will work.  Biggest challenge I have found is the word docs and xls sheets clients send me to make their printed pricelist into an online inventory to import into the system and manage. 

How does that relate to DNN you might ask??  For the unsuspecting newcomer to DNN, who doesn't understand there is alot to know to stop it running like bloatware, and then the learning curve of any ecommerce solution, the fact that the solutions are not free, and your client is going to provide you with data that you may not be experienced in 'converting' data, or experience in skinning... there is a recipe for disaster mixing here.  And I'm not being a scaremonger here, I'm really telling you that when it comes to ecommerce, on anything that requires more than one or two products that are manually entered into a site, you need to really evaluate what you're going to get yourself into. 

DNN over the last few years has become more mainstream in it's acceptance with enormous help from Microsoft. In fact without the support of Microsoft, I doubt it would have survived, but that's not relevant - we have a good opensource solution around.  The licensing model of DNN does allow it to be downloaded, rebranded, badged, whatever, and sell as your own.  It's been a brilliant solution to get started with when developing larger Microsoft based projects and this alone will see it continue to grow.

However, the ecosystem to develop a really polished ecommerce solution hasn't been so good, so there have been plenty of stop and start attempts in with the core store project that have seen it struggle to be something that can be compared to other standalone solutions.

This isn't really fair I think because the standalone apps don't do anything else but do what they have to do, but DotNetNuke is an application itself, and has plenty more apart from ecommerce to make work, which is why I believe there are so few ecommerce solutions around.

Sure we have the ASPDSF (AspDotNetStoreFront) solution but after reading the DNN forums about that, I'm not convinced they have got their product really polished yet and not enough DNN stores running with that solution embedded. There are plenty of Standalone ASPDNSF sites working, but this is my point.. if you want a store only, why bother with DotNetNuke?? Why bother with anything apart from a store solution in the first place?

This is where I think it gets interesting... website owners want more - they are sold these ideas on having a one stop solution, website, blogs, store, social networking, forums, articles, all under the same roof... and to my knowledge, there isn't much apart from DNN that even comes close to delivering it.

I think you need to be very clear in the discovery element of 'what does your client want' ... and if they only want an ecommerce store - then dont' use DNN - find them something that will work just as a store. I think there would be hundreds, if not thousands of store solutions that could work and suit a client more that DNN and their embedded ecommerce solution will offer.

It's not saying that DNN isn't any good, because it is - it's a sterling solution for a one stop give me it all website.  Nothing, in my opinion really stacks up.  In most of the research I've done with websites that are joomla, drupal or mambo based, they use their own written ecommerce solution for the website, or a third party php product they have massaged and made their own.  Again, nothing wrong with this at all - it's really an observation, but it does lead me to believe that people who are embarking on an ecommerce solution, need to evaluate a couple of things -

What is the purpose of the website?
If just for selling - then look at other solutions apart from DNN - even a paypal shop could be used.

Do they have experience in working with content management style sites?
If not, then learn the website framework before embedding ecommerce.

Are you experienced in the DNN website environment?
If not.. DO NOT use your customers as guineapigs to learn - you will lose friends, hair, sleep and money.. ok it's not oxygen but not nice to live without any of these when they could have been avoided with a little bit of hindsight.

Consider using two websites / domains
By that I mean - www.store.domain and www.domain - and build out your business that way. Sure it's two sites - but it could help you keep a clean slate for ecommerce and put all your other solutions on a DNN build. I would seriously consider that if I didn't have any experience in DNN or wanted to look forward to using DNN and can't get the ecommerce thing sorted out.  My preference will always be Catalook.  I've got colleagues who are shifting their ecommerce from other DNN modules and moving them to Catalook - because they are fed up to the back teeth with their current DNN ecommerce solution.

Don't expect the free solution to be the best one but have a build where you can test and participate in it's development where you can be part of the solution as it matures.

Looking at DNN and how it performs, and the fact I'm finding Catalook works really well for me and my DNN site users, I'll continue to use it for sites that want to encompass more than just ecommerce.  It's incredibly good value.

Looking forward, for clients that want nothing apart from a store, I've learnt my lesson and won't be carrying the 'content management system' baggage and looking seriously at stand alone ecommmerce solutions like http://www.magentoecommerce.com so that I too can sleep at night not wondering if the next DNN build will work, when it will be released, when the bugs will be fixed up or .. now another issue - will it only be in the paid version.

I'll be posting more about my ecommerce findings in the future.

Nina Meiers