We all aware of that finding an open source software based on Microsoft technology is like searching for needle in a hay stack, let alone a suitable one. dashCommerce is one of those very rare open source .NET ecommerce platforms in the wild, other two available option you have- DotShoppingCart and nopCommerce (we will come to these two in the future).
dashCommerce formerly known as the Microsoft Commerce Starter Kit, is a complete CMS (Content Management System) and ecommerce open source solution. Current stable version dashCommerce 3.0 is quite flexible and robust in nature, as it’s incorporates all three major components of an ecommerce application:
- Product Catalog
- Shopping Cart
- Order Fulfillment
Key Features
Key features of dashCommerce:
- One page checkout
- Drop-In skinning / themes
- Configurable shipping and tax rates
- Drop-In Provider Model for-
- Shipping Providers
- Payment Providers
- Tax Providers (US and Canada only. Real-time. Tax tables are updated monthly. Requires Yearly Subscription)
- Coupon Providers
- Simple model for creating Sku’s
- Partial Refunds
- Product cross sales & automatic thumbnail generation for images.
- Fully Localizable, currently translated into 11 languages.
Drawbacks
Well until now everything sounds cool right? you found a .NET ecommerce platform, which happens to be open source and got some pretty cool features that you can’t do without. now lets talk about the inconveniences. dashCommerce is far from a perfect ecommerce platform, got some serious drawbacks that needs to be considered before planning to move into dashCommerce.
- As of version 3.0 only PayPal is supported for payment integration.
- No Performance optimization
- No batch import/export for either catalog or product.
- No Wishlist
- Lack of multicurrency support
- No integrated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Analytics option
- Not so impressive backend control panel, lacks usability
Finally those who are hardcore fan of Shopping cart software, note dashCommerce is just more than a shopping cart system-it’s a full fledge ecommerce platform. dashCommerce community is very dedicated & active and their support is excellent. It’s improving and growing fast. dashCommerce isn’t mature (in terms of features) enough and lacks some key ingredients needed for modern ecommerce platform. It does very well all the basic ecommerce tasks as well well some advance tasks, but if you require full fledge ecommerce platform with colorful features, dashCommerce isn’t your first choice.
Recommended Resources
Here are some recommended resources that will give you more in depth idea on dashCommerce, it’s growth, features and system requirements etc.
dashCommerce is dead… the developer doesn’t seems to be interested in development, there have been absolutely no development in last 18 months