My first nopCommerce website gone Live!!

nopCommerce

After spending 6 months with this open source nopCommerce platform. My first nopCommerce website finally went live. http://www.thenorthface.com.au 

Scope

Our business requirement in a nut shell:-

• Build a multi tenant e-commerce platform to cater all of our brands.
• All our brand sites are independent to each others in terms of development requirements or target audience. Only the main workflow is the same.
• We have multiple integration points that we need to interact with. (Not surprise!!)
• The first brand is The North Face

Challenges

• 6 Integration Points
• CRM (Customer Information)
• CMS
• Payment Gateway (CyberSource)
• Promotions / Product Price (1 way coming in from other integration point)
• Inventory System
• Product Reviews
• 2 Console Apps
• Bulk Image Upload
• Inventory System / Price

Thoughts of nopCommerce

Likes

• Open Source
• MVC
• Easy to learn
• The source code is fairly solid and clean. There were likes and hates, but I am generally happy.
• Plugins readily available to purchase or easy to build your own
• Payment workflow is rock solid and easy to integrate with (I am using CyberSource)
• Multi-tenancy semi-friendly
• Multi-store ready
• Admin interface out of the box is nice and professional enough
• Good support from the official forum

Dislikes

• There is no Controller Factory in their MVC architecture. I kind of expected that for a "platform"
• Telerick MVC for admin (but they are now using Kendo UI in v3.3, which is good now)
• Easy to customize? This is an arguable point. Surely it wasn't hard but could be easier. As a platform, I would like to see the core code set to protected/virtual (to allow custom code override) and more hooks (empty protected class) in the core controllers.

The North Face Australia

A quick comparison of old and new site. Which one do you like more?

Level 1 (Root) Category 

 

L: The level 1 category is a little messy. At the root level, it shows everything from all the child categories.

R: The level 1 category shows featured products of level 2 categories, this is now organized in a systematic way that allow administrator to decide what to show. 

Level 2 (Children) Sub-Category 

 

Color variants of the same product no longer clogging up space. 

We can now show more variety of products on category page.

Category Page - Filter

 

Color filters now more colorful than ever!!

Product Detail Page

 

Customer can choose different color on product detail page.

Shopping Cart

 

Demo

Not too bad? Why not try it out yourself? It may change your decision making should you need to choose an ecommerce platform next time. Definitely recommended.

http://demo.nopcommerce.com/