I am looking at different stores to put in DNN basically what I am looking for is a store that I can run through the different sites for one DNN install. CATALook looks good as does the Cameleon Catalog and Cart and Portal Store has been around for awhile.
Does anybody have any info on ROI for these products? Other things I want to know are database usage per item and how do they compare to the AIC-EC free cart out there? Any info? I know Nina likes CATALook maybe she could give me a few thoughts on why.
I like Catalook because it's the closest I've ever seen a product to do what it's supposed to do. Initially, I bought the full portal store and have tried for months to get it working.. Not many people have actually got it working correctly - some days I got
6 updates from snowcovered, fixing this, patching that.. but then they would break the whole site, so I would have to restore the whole site again. Every install of Portal store brings up hundreds of lines of sql errors, which I'm told to ignore.. but other
products don't, and often every patch update, of which I have about 30 of them, with no versioning, so I never quite know which is which. Portal store is hard to skin, in fact I'd go close to say .. it's only really skinnable if you are prepared to modify
the ascx files.. and that's just not the right thing to do. However, the layout of Portal store is probably the nicest, but you know what.. just get into the admin side of things and you'll say to yourself.. I'll forgo some of the nice square boxes, just to
get functionality. And for $200, it doesn't rate any more compared to Catalook. Mark Hoskins has done a fantastic job in his shopping cart.. however the skinning capabilties are not quite there yet, and I find it a little challenging to work around, some of
the wording doesn't quite work for me, and it's not as intuitively laid out, but it installed perfectly and I think in time will a major player.. I can't really skin this so well at the moment but he's working on it, and I think his next version will be great.
His portal replicate is good too and he codes well, so that's a real bonus. With Catalook, I can import products, which is very important for my clients. I'm going to be dedicating alot of my efforts in this product and promote to my customer base too. As
you can see by the pricing of the Catalook store, it's not expensive, and I'm not taking any sort of special commissions from Catalook either. I'm grateful to see such growth in a ecom prouct that I've not seen happen with Portal Store. (sorry guys - you're
nice, but OMG working around portal store with any more than 100 products - you've got your work cut out for you) The problems I see with ecommerce is multi faceted - - We have store functionality areas to consider - We have payment processors/gateways often
affected by where yo ulive. - We have areas of DNN that are not fully developed. - And - who is working with it? A developer who can tweak bugs, or the end user These different problems when related together in a single job, make deciding a product very frustrating
when you have decided to take the DNN road - It's the .. Yes.. but.. but .. but. problem.. I can do this, but I can't do that.. So after spending hours and hours looking for answers in many directions, I heard from Susanne after unsuccessfully using her product
in April - and Wow, she had gone back and completely revamped the product to work in a way I've never seen module managed. She emailed me and asked me to look at it.. and I installed 22 modules, in one go, without a single error.. and within 4 hours, I had
2,000 products in 22 categories, on the site. My 6 months of work, with Portal Store with 22 different sub category XLS files that took me ages to work out, and never quite imported correctly because it took a , in a description and left me with product fields
that had no prices, and text in wrong spots.. are now in my archive folder to never come out again!! Sure there are bugs with Catalook, but so small, many of them aesthetical, layout, suggestions, and she's come up trumps on each one of them and responds quickly
and has proper versioning so I can look under the modules category and work out what version it is. By the time I've finished skinning the Catalook store it will look fantastic and value for money - I hope Susanne does well out of this and I wish I could code..
I'm going to be skinning her site and we've got skinned portals depicting each of her product range - ticketing, subscriptions, products, rentals... ready for launch once her site has been skinned. In fact, I did visit somene's site which had been skinned
using my Financial Blues skin, and the standard Catalook store skin.. it looked great... *sigh*.. the product was just slightly alternative.. you'll have to go find it to see .. So there is my long winded opinion.. and it's back do my core team work for the
3.0 release, which to my knowledge, none of the shopping carts will run on at this stage. Nina Meiers
I was afraid of that part about 3.0 but it sounds like CATALook might be more of what I am looking for. If you have any pointers on skinning the CATALook store Nina I would appreciate it (I know you are busy with 3.0) Now has anybody used the Kodeheadz Storefront
- Chameleon Catalog and Cart? Its only a little less than Portal Store but it looks like it might have it more together than them. Also does anybody have any info on the database size per item for the different stores - How much space do I need if I have 100
items? a 1000? Maybe some of the store developers can chime in here?
database / images two different things.. you just import an xls sheet into the mdb file, upload the mdb file into the portal dirctory - and click import.. Very little space needed. and you can import your customers too with catalook. Skinning catalook is easy
- I am hoping to make mods to the ascx files too to make them nice and .. as the Dutch guy in the GoldMember movie would say -
TOIGHT! In the catalook store files, in the skins folder is the *blue* css files.. it looks lke she's taken the ttt gallery files and made good with them, but the latest build of catalook seemed to make changes to the css file, which I haven't had a
chance to play with. I'll ask Mark to drop in here with his comments.. Snowcovered.. never seen them post on forums.. Catalook - I'll ask her.. but her english isn't so good.. Mark - ChameleonCart - has an opinion and I love his passion for DNN!! :-) Nina
okay I think CATALooK is what I am going to have to use it seems to be more in line with what I would expect it to do. Thanks you very much Nina for the info I know you are working hard towards that code freeze this week.
AIS-EC 1) has been designed to be very easy to use. 2) We are working on a service pack that will bring many fixes and updates. I think our first release of version 2.0 was a good demonstration of where we are heading and trying to accomplish. 3) Our system
isn't as feature rich yet as the other systems but it is free and will continue to get better. It will be really useful after this service pack due this month. Thanks,
Okay and how long before it works with 3.0 in fact any of the mentioned stores I would like to know that. I am planning on a multi-site usage for the store but I am waiting on the 3.0 version on DNN to do it - no sense in rebuilding everything in a month if
I don't need to.
Nina- Thanks for sharing your experience. I have been debating which store to get for quite a while and the CataLook store looks incredible. I am amazed at all the functionality it includes for a such a low price. After browsing a few of sample stores, however,
some of the the sites seemed quite slow. I am not sure if this was due to the general site speed or was specific to the store modules. Do you happen to know if the code follows the same programming pratices of DNN (using BLL and DAL layers)? I am hoping it
it just general performance of those servers because I would really like to buy it. I noticed that the sample stores where in Germany so I am hoping thats it.
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