ASPDotNetStorefront is a lot to type out, so hereafter, I will refer to it as ASPDNSF, which is easier to type.

ASPDNSF is another great shopping cart. This cart is used by some big names and it’s used by them for a reason – the cart is great. Out of the box, this cart excels. It has the basics you would expect from an online shopping cart: payment gateways, shipping gateways and so much more. Image handling with ASPDNSF is really good and by far, the best out-of-the-box image management I’ve used. But all these features come at a price, which is currently $1295 for the ‘good’ version. If you want the source, which you will, add an additional $995. Want updates, that will cost another $299. Total price for the store, the source and 1 year of updates: $2,589.00 – yep. Wait, don’t make up your mind just yet, even though that seems like a lot of money, it’s not a bad deal when you consider what you’re getting.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Good

Image management in ASPDNSF is very simple and very robust. Simple and powerful isn’t something you’ll usually find with a shopping cart, but somehow, they manged to make it work. Not only does it work, it works miracles. All those nice mouse-over images you see in online stores are built into this cart. With some carts, you have to manually add in the image function for every item, which is very time consuming and requires a good deal of programming knowledge. And then there’s Zoomify, a fantastic flash image viewer that is a godsend for detailed imaging in shopping carts. It takes a little work to use with each product, but it’s all drag and drop and anyone can use it – no programmer needed.

Another one of the great things about ASPDNSF is PABP compliance. You’ll never appreciate how much this means until you get the subpoena. TJ-Max and Marshals are currently facing a multi million dollar lawsuit thanks to their site’s data being hacked. This storefront was built with security in mind and that’s something that can not be said of many store fronts. Security should be a major concern of all shopping carts, but sadly, it is not. ASPDNSF takes security seriously and is yet another reason they’re one of my favorite shopping carts.

Search engines LOVE ASPDNSF. You won’t find an easier to use search engine method than the one used in this cart. It’s so customizable and simple to use, it shames most other shopping carts. This is a huge positive when it comes to a storefront and something I can not stress enough as being mission critical. Search engine optimization is damned good with ASPDNSF.

Inventory control is nothing short of spectacular. A lot of carts don’t track inventory by size, color and whatever other variants you may have, but ASPDNSF does and it does it very well. It’s also easy to change, update and manage inventory if you have a brick and mortar store. There’s even a third party tool called T-Hub that will integrate the store with QuickBooks POS and that’s something you’re really going to need once the online orders start rolling in.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Not So Good

Product management with ASPDNSF isn’t the best out there, but it’s not the worst either. While adding products and variants are very easy to do, changing prices and availability are not easy. ZenCart and OSCommerce have a very nice indicator for IF a product is published, but this is not the case in ASPDNSF. You will have to manually check on an item’s published status, which can be very time consuming. However, adding variants (size, color, etc.) are much easier to accomplish in ASPDNSF than ZenCart or OSCommerce default installs.

Templates are going to require knowledge in XML and XLS to really get the look you want and even then, without the source code, you’re still going to be at the mercy of the default program. However, with the source, you can do almost anything your programmer can imagine. It’s really powerful, but the power comes at a price – ease of use.

Support for ASPDNSF isn’t the best. You get 30 day support with your purchase, but the support is limited to problems and built-in features. If you want something not in the feature list, you’re going to have to hire someone to make it happen. Their forum, while informative, lacks the user base of ZenCart and OSCommerce and so a lot of the features you may want aren’t addressed and as such, they don’t exist without hiring someone to make your features and that’s not cheap.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Ugly

$$$ it’s going to cost you a fairly substantial amount to get your site where you probably want it to be and that’s something you’re going to have to consider when looking for an online storefront. Without the source, your hands will be tied when it comes to really making your site ‘zing’.

Some features you expect from a storefront don’t exist in ASPDNSF, which is a shame. Being able to filter products is possible, but the method is clumsy and down right confusing to many customers. With the source, you can make your own filtering, but it will cost you more money in programmer fees. Product filtering is a feature many customers expect and you will lose customers from lack of product filtering.

Google Analytics suffer with ASPDNSF. On the feature list, you’ll find Google Analytics as a feature of ASPDNSF. I’ve found the opposite to be true. You can get almost all features to work, but not all. There’s a odd situation where you can use some of Analytic’s features, but not all of them. Depending on the method you use, you can get certain features to work. As it stands, I have every feature of analytics except site searches. I’ve been told this issue is going to be resolved, but I’ve yet to see as resolution to this issue.

Windows hosting. I’m a linux guy, so using a Windows-ISS based host wasn’t something I wanted. Windows hosting costs more than Linux/Apache and lacks some of the features I’ve become used to using. I know, this is a preference issue, but it’s a big change for me and my hosting style and needs.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – What it all means

ASPDNSF is still my favorite storefront, despite its few shortcomings. If you’re looking to sell a few products that don’t have size and color variations, ASPDNSF may not be the best choice for you. But if you’re serious about ecommerce and your shopping cart, ASPDNSF is a bargain. It handles variants, sizes and inventory as good, if not better than any other shopping cart I’ve used and that’s with a default install. You also get a nearly infinite amount of products to add and that something you’re not going to get from many shopping carts. SEO is a breeze with this cart and while there are a few minor issues with SEO, this cart is by far, the easiest to use with SEO.

The cost may be off putting to some, but it’s also a one-time expenditure. A lot of other carts charge per month or even per sale, which to me is ridiculous. In the long run, you’ll be happy with the money you spent on ASPDNSF. It’s going to cost at least the same amount, in programmer fees or time, to get ZenCart and other free carts to act like ASPDNSF.

In this series, I will try and broach some of the pros and cons of various shopping cart and various ecommerce solutions. We will begin with ZenCart.

Zen Cart is a really nice online shopping cart. Out of the box, it works. It’s basic, but it does work. There’s a beauty to its simplicity, thus Zen. Out of the box, you get basic image handling, easy to use and create templates and built in credit card processing gateways. You also have the ability to add a lot of features that would cost thousands extra for most pay shopping carts, but with Zen Cart, most every extension and contribution that add functionality to your cart are free. $0 is a very attractive price for a piece of such powerful software, but there’s a cost. ZenCart management is not for the faint of heart. ZenCart requires a fairly high level of knowledge to really have a good shopping cart.

ZenCart – The Good

One of the best things about Zen Cart is it’s free. Yep, free. Not only is it free, it’s also open source, which means, given enough knowledge, you can make the cart do anything you want it to do. Well, anything within reason or the ability of your programmer. And it’s not just the cart that is free, the source is also free for Zen Cart. Shopping carts source code can cost thousands of dollars, but Zen Cart is free. And when you really need to change a function of the site, the source is, well, the best source. Updates and upgrades are also free and that’s a big plus in the world of ecommerce.

Designing a shopping cart with ZenCart is fairly simple, if you can design a website. Zen Cart uses a great template system. It’s very easy to use and it makes updating the software a lot easier. I really like the hierarchical taxonomic structure of the template system. It takes a little getting used to and it’s not a WYSIWYG system, you still need to code, but it’s one of the easier template systems I’ve used. And let us not forget, ZenCart is free.

Zen Cart – The Not So Good

Product management with ZenCart is both a godsend and a nightmare. The godsend is keeping track of products that are published vs non-published items. Price adjusting and category management. Any system is going to take some time to learn, but Zen Cart provided a wealth of information about your products, all on one page and all easy to update and edit. In some aspects, it’s the best product management layout I’ve used. However, adding variants (size, color, etc..) to a product is archaic. ZenCart’s cousin, OSCommerce, has an add-in that addresses this issue, but not in Zen Cart. ZenCart 3 is scheduled to address this issue, but the schedule itself is 2 years old. There are a few contributions and add-ons that try and address this issue, but the method for adding variants to products falls far short of user friendly and is downright hostile at times.

ZenCart – The Ugly

The downside – you need a real programmer. And every upgrade is going to require some rather extensive work to keep the look, feel and functionality of your site. All the little bells and whistles are going to cost you in programmer fees or extensive amounts of your time. Your cart is going to need a lot of add-on, contributions and graphics to have a nice looking and highly functional site. Images handling is fairly poor, but there are add-ons to make image handling as good as most any other website, but again, you’ll need someone who knows PHP and SQL to get it functional and be able to update your site in the future.

Search engine optimization is going to take a lot of work with Zen Cart. The shopping cart isn’t exactly what you would call search engine friendly out of the box, but that can be fixed with an add-on. So there’s more money to the programmer.

ZenCart – What it all means

Depending on what you’re selling, Zen Cart may be the best solution for your shopping cart. It can handle an infinite amounts of products, but if you have a lot of variants (size, color, etc.), you’ll probably be happier with an easier to use administrator interface for stock and attributes than the one used by Zen Cart. If you’re selling products without variants ZenCart may be a great solution for your web site’s shopping cart.

coming up next… ASPDotNetStoreFront