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!