I recently had a client who wanted to setup an online store, they had several hundred products to list, and wanted to have something up as quickly as possible. I had read quite a lot of good reviews about nopCommerce, an open source .NET shopping cart product built with MVC. I decided to give it a shot, to see if it could meet our needs, and it absolutely did. I love this product!
Setup was a breeze, simply deploy the product to your hosted environment, and access it using their handy web install. You can easily setup your username, login credentials, create a DB, etc, all from this install page. Once it’s completed (about 3-5 minutes if everything goes smooth), you are ready to roll.
If you want to change the look and feel of your store, it’s quick and easy using custom themes.
The amount of features in this product is overwhelming at first, but once you familiarize yourself with the administration side of things, it’s not too bad. We were able to quickly set up tax categories based on shipping addresses for example, a very handy feature. We were also able to easily hook into Google analytics, bulk upload products using Excel, and set up PayPal to handle all our credit card processing. Over a period of a few days, we were able to have a fully functional robust online store. The best part about it, is that my client was able to easily familiarize himself with the administration, and make these changes easily himself, saving me some time, and him some money.
The store itself is very snappy and quick too.
Overall this is a great product, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an open source shopping cart built on the .NET framework!
I am trying to build a website with multistore fronts. Does Nopcommerce support this feature? what were the challenges of using nopcommerce ? Any advice would be welcome
Hello Rejimon,
I have not had a need to try this feature, so I can’t speak to it with a great deal of knowledge. From some quick reading it looks like nopCommerce does not currently support this feature but because the solution is open source, it appears that someone may have implemented this from the looks of this post.
Overall I have not really had any challenges using nopCommerce, but I do recommend purchasing their optional user manual if you do decide to use them. It will save you time over the long run, and you can distribute it to your clients as well.
If you’re looking for an easy to setup, open source, feature-rich ecommerce platform for ASP.NET I can definitely recommend nopCommerce!
Brent, I am in the process of choosing the best open source eCommerce solution, preferably MVC as I am a .Net developer. the only option found so far is nopCommerce. I am wondering if you know anything else?
Also, I am very concerned about Mobile storefront. does this solution support mobile UI?
Thanks
Hi Ethan,
As far as .NET ecommerce systems, I know there are quite a few out there, but I have not used any of them unfortunately. I did quite a bit of research and talking to other developers about what system they preferred and heard great things consistently about nopCommerce, so that is what lead me down this road. It has worked great for my needs, and was pretty easy to setup, although I have not modified any of the source code at all. It worked right out of the box.
As far as mobile support, I also have to defer unfortunately. I can tell you that the theme I’m using on my existing nopCommerce site is built with mobile friendly CSS, so pages are responsive, etc. Just from some Googling I see that nopCommerce includes some mobile modules as well, but I have not really played with those. I am assuming however that they would work great for rendering a mobile specific layout of your store.
I hope that is some help.
Thanks for the comment!
I like your overview. NopCommerce is the best .NET e-commerce even when compared to the big paid systems.
I totally agree! I’ve done a lot of research on them too, and this is the best. The feature set is excellent for an open source project, and the team is putting out new releases on a regular basis.
I am working on a highly customized version of it for a store, and with the great plugin system they offer, I can do a LOT of it without messing with core code, so that is great for applying new updates later.
They are going to build the multi-store support for version 3, so that’s good to hear. Once I am done with this project, I am going to see if they need any help on that one, since it would be cool to be on the team.
The mobile template is pretty great too. We plan to pimp that out a bit later also.
Oddly enough, the first location for the stores we are doing is in Madison, WI :)
Thanks for the comment Chris. I would be interested in seeing your end product. NopCommerce has soooo many features that it can be a bit intimidating sometimes if you’re just looking for a very basic store setup. Best of luck with the project in Madison :)
Hey there :)
what a great review it helped me finding lot of questions i had before start using this open source product…
but i want to ask you how do you publish the website after finishing it?
thanks
Hello.
You can also check recently released Virto Commerce platform. It was designed specially for .net developers and utilizes latest technologies. It is more focused on shops of bigger size unlike NopCommerce and supports deep customizations.
Please find the Community edition here https://virtocommerce.codeplex.com/
We would love to hear the feedback.
Yes, I agree that nopcommerce is great for ecommerce hosting solution. I have used this CMS for many years and I host my site with asphostportal (http://asphostportal.com). Beside good CMS, we also need good hosting to make sure that our site is always running fine.
I am very concerned about Mobile storefront. does this solution support mobile UI?
Brent, I am in the process of choosing the best open source eCommerce solution, preferably MVC as I am a .Net developer. the only option found so far is nopCommerce. I am wondering if you know anything else?
Thanks
Hi Susan,
Truthfully it has been years since I have worked with nopCommerce, and I’m sure it’s changed a lot since then. So I am probably not in the best position to give advice on it. Best of luck with your search though!