I have a shop and would like to see some of our products online. I know a bit of C# and would like to purchase an off-the-shelf shopping cart to get me on my way. Any recommendations?

I was speaking to Leo from WorkConnexions about a client of his who was looking for a shopping cart for his website. He wanted something quickly, so a custom-written solution wasn’t an option, so I spent some time looking around the Web to find a package that could fit the bill for him. Oh, and the other requisite was that the package has to be a .Net one as he had some resources available to assist with the project.

One of the packages I came across was one called AspDotNetStoreFront. I don’t know if it’s the best shopping cart out there, but it shows lots of promise. The package seems to have all the features that you would need from an e-commerce platform including:

• catalogue management
• gift card support
• multi-lingual capabilities
• inventory tracking
• full customisation
• customer tracking
• very comprehensive shipping options
• PayPal integration

and lots more! Now, there are many shopping cart software packages out there, so why did I pick this one? Well, the thing that really impressed me was the versatility of the package. And there’s no better place to analyse this than to look at a number of different sites produced with the package. Here are some example:

Not too bad, and there’s other examples on their portfolio page. To tell you the truth, I’m glad I did some market research as it opened my eyes to the rich feature sets that different products have implemented.

Many, many moons ago, I build the e-commerce engine for The Joke Shop. It was a labour of love more than anything else and it grew gradually over a period of years. However, there was a lot of time involved, and investing in a package like this could have shaved months off the development. Glad I came across this one.