Merchello is the eCommerce solution we've all been waiting for

I’ve worked with a lot of eCommerce platforms out there and they all fail eventually in the same way. It’s the square peg in a round hole issue. You have the spark of an idea over time, working at it, growing it, eventually becoming a passionate flame of an ideal. But then the inevitable happens, you need to pick a platform to build it on.

A custom build can be time consuming and not always as flexible as you’d think it would be towards the end. Off the shelf solutions force you to change or trim back your wants, and sometimes your needs to work in their strict regime. They’re also pretty pricey when trying to pick one with enough features to somewhat come close to matching your eCommerce site, the one you really want.

The good news is, with Merchello, you don’t have to sacrifice anything.

Merchello is an open source eCommerce package for Umbraco 7, the latest and greatest version of the CMS. Built from the ground up, Merchello has a wonderful UI that integrates beautifully with the new Umbraco CMS look and feel. It works with the Umbraco workflows and content management rather than trying to replace or duplicate them, this by the way lets you build out almost any conceivable presentation and flow to your site. It’s also built to grow with Umbraco as the CMS continues to develop. It’s the most lightweight, fast and designer friendly solution I’ve ever worked with. But, the feature that frees you to build the online store you want, without sacrifice, is extensibility.

We made it straightforward to bolt on the customizations you need for your store while keeping the core clean and easy to manage.

The core is an easy to use but fully featured products section. It handles product variants, prices and discounts, stock levels, inventory tracking, shipping, invoices, all the good stuff without the useless bloat.

Now, the biggest technical hurdle that has always made you settle or even give up on some needs or wants has been features like shipping, payment systems, notifications, taxes, and god forbid you have reporting that’s actually beneficial to you.

Merchello lets you build modules or providers to have these systems work the way you need them to.

Shipping’s always tricky with oversized items, oddly shaped packages, glitter bombs, etc. Creating your own shipping rules and features always lets you meet those demands. The ability to work with every online payment processor out there frees you from being held hostage by the small handful of options any other off the shelf solution might offer. The same levels of extensibility with order related notifications and taxation gives you an level of control that no other off the shelf solution can match.

For some reason, the ability to create any kind of reports I want really excites me, and that’s probably a little sad, but whenever I use an eCommerce system, reporting always seems at best boring and unwieldy. At worst, completely useless. With the ability to create reports from scratch, in any manner I want, those things are going to have meme’s, triangle graphs, every conceivable type of spreadsheet (exportable as well of course). They’ll even be faxable! I kid, kind of, but it’s really an important role of the business process to be able to track and manage your sales, and reporting has always been a huge facet of that.

Also, did I mention it’s free.

As in beer.

For more about Merchello check out these links, it’s well worth it.

Here’s the Merchello website. For the nerd in you, you can find them on GitHub. And here’s a little demo, hope you love cats!