Stores

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.

Re: Stores

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

Re: Stores

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?

Re: Stores

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

Re: Stores

Anywhere we can see CataLook in action? The link from the snowcovered item is broken.

Re: Stores

Catalook Site - Here Roughly skinned example Here Not complete - launching around 3.0 release Another example here This store only has about 800 products online. Nina Meiers

Re: Stores

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.

Re: Stores

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,

Re: Stores

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.

Re: Stores

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.

Re: Stores

Good point mathisjay! I was going to download the trial of the Catalook and see if it was okay on my current site - only way to really check it out.

Re: Stores

Our site is close to launch, but here's a sneak peak. It uses Catalook and I strongly back them. Even core changes to the store have been implemented through my suggestions. Their support is just an e-mail away and they are nothing short of awesome!! The store is a bit confusing a first, due to the many many many things it can do. I've been running it for a few months now and am still finding new features. My site link is here: A Protocall I think you will like what we are about!!

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Site looks great! Should be a good resource for the community.

Re: Stores

Hi guys, just noticed this thread. Id like to chime in.. The Chameleon Store is able to be skinned pretty completely (i call them layouts to differentiate from dnn skins), you would upload the layout into the store module, using a zip file structure similar to dnn skins. There are 9 "pages" to each layout. These are html files with a certain name of each, ie ProductPane.htm, ShopperMenu.htm. etc they also have [TAGS] to define the different controls.. these files are then matched to the xml file, and the controls get their attributes defined there, and the [Tags] in the xml file define what the control becomes... then we save it as ascx files, and load it for the storefront... so, very similar to skinning dnn .. and very flexible. I am going to be adding many new features for the 3.0 release during december. One thing my store does is manages licensing for downloads, and has many options for product media. If you want a trial, just ask me using the website "Request Trial" link at www.kodhedz.net I have been working on this version of the store for many months, and completely rewrote the older version of XpdIT store, it uses dataprovider model, and i doubt there will be much problems in updating to run in the 3.0 environment, seeing as i have been careful to stick to the rules. My biggest thing is I don't want the store to be limiting. So i made sure you can hook into many of the processes so that you can just create Add ons that do what you want, by extending the feature set of the core store module. Examples: you want a datagrid view for the product listing, not a datalist with paging as it is now.. so simple would be to make a ascx module in vs , import the dynst.storefront dll, and then you can create the functionality you want, and it will be fine. There is also another use: the way i set up the admin sections for the store are wasy to modify if you want to add features, rearrange the buttons and what they point to. So if you want to make an addon for reporting, then you can also easily add it to the menu, and you can easily make it available for a layout control... I have a premiere solution of dnn that i have been working on for a year now and its almost done. what it does is extends the administration interface for dnn. but i need to load up the separate parts of the store, and assign permissions to any users who can add products, edit products, edit categories.. etc, separating the responsibility. so i made sure that you can do as much as possible with the existing framework, and allow it to extend in most way you can imagine. I am going to be adding many webservices to the store some time... yes things are quite hectic this month already. But i have finished a PortalDuplication addon for the store as well, so now you can use the Duper module, and the store together, to create pre-stocked stores with products, categories etc. I know .. excel import / export is coming as well.. thanks. mark. www.dnn2go.com

Re: Stores

AIS-EC fully supports BLL/DAL Provider model. Currently, it comes with an SQL Data Provider. Thanks,

Re: Stores

Hey folks: It's great to hear Nina's thoughts...she's always been outspoken and honest with what she feels. I also looked at all the stores, including the prices of things...and I just couldn't see the point of .netShip's and companies pricing and license politicies. I didn't want to have 20 modules that do a 'call home' on every site I create. So I ended up downloading catalook's product as well as one other (I don't remember wihich one, sorry). CataLook has been promising a new version, so I'm waiting for that before I attempt my first installation (though I've purchased it for a client). They've been very upfront with what's going on, and though they're a bit late with the latest version, I'd rather it was late and right, than late and messed stuff up! Also, the ease of skinning CataLOOK was important to me because it shows (at least to me) a good DNN implementation. I'm not taking anything away from any of the other modules that are being sold. Obviously CataLOOK is being outsold right now by Portal Store, but in these cases, sometimes a 'reverse demand curve' applies unfortunately...by that I mean that if a product sells for 300 dollars more, then it *must* be better, right??? No. Not right. In fact, when I looked at the features from cataLOOK against the features of the other products, the friendliness, honesty and quick responses from cataLOOK, well, I decided that less expensive, could truly just be a merchant selling a good product at a fair price. Now, I have to be fair here, and state that I've yet to even *install* the product I've purchased for my client...but as soon as the next version comes out I'll let everyone know. I hope I'll be as happy as Nina...and am confident I will be. Sometimes people overprice themselves out of the market, and sometimes they are so much better that they feel they can charge one dollar less than the market can bear. They have this right of course. And as consumers, the words, 'caveat emptor' still apply thousands of years later... ;-)

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@aava I have used and installed pretty much every module ever brought out for one or more clients. Right now im working on testing out the catalook store and so far so good. I can even read the german on htere site :) But Ive learned on thing in my years of dealing with dnn, If nina tells me a module is good I buy it , simple as that ;)

Re: Stores

Hello. I am looking at the Catalook store w/ full source but have some questions ... 1) Can I use the store front on two separate "parent" portals as long as they are all using the same Dnn installation? The two sites are on different domain names but using the same Dnn installation. 2) Is there any documentation included in English to explain the details of store configuration, etc? Thanks, Joseph

Re: Stores

Yes. You can have another instance of Catalook running on other subportals Documentation could be better, but yes there is a lot of documentation in ach section of the admin area. The support you get is nothing short of awesome. Trust me when I say that. I will never switch away from Catalook. -Dave

Re: Stores

Hi Dennis, Is the patch available already? I just browsed your site to download but I couldn't find it anyhwere. Any help is appreciated. Thanks, Ann