Umbraco and eCommerce

Many CMS products out there have an eCommerce platform to them.  Kentico, Sitecore, epiServer, Sitefinity… the list goes on and on.  So, I often get asked, does Umbraco have one?

No, it has many.  Well, at least 4 that I know of and are popular with the Umbraco community.

The core Umbraco CMS product, though it has official packages offered / sold by the company, it doesn’t sell an eCommerce package.  However, there are at least 4 eCommerce products that I know of offered by third party developers / companies as packages which integrate with Umbraco nicely.

First, and probably most well known amongst Umbraco users, both old and new, is uCommerce.

 

uCommerce - Your premier .NET ecommerce platform

uCommerce is probably one of the most mature eCommerce packages currently out for Umbraco.  It’s even offered as a Sitecore add on, though it started its life 100% Umbraco.

There are three licenses offered: Free, Pro and Enterprise.  Pro is currently priced at 2,499 EUR per year, and Enterprise is at 4,499 EUR per year.  And, Free is free.

Yeah, seems a bit steep for a community used to paying little for an awesome CMS and ecosystem, but consider this to be a complete solution to your online business, and it’s just a drop in the bucket.

uCommerce boasts features such as:

• Multiple categories
• Variant pricing
• Related products
• Inventory management
• Multiple currencies
• Multiple languages
• Multiple stores
• Brand management
• Various promos and discounts support
• Faceted search support
• So much more…

It really does have a long list of great features.  Not all of them are available under the free version though, nor the Pro.  Check out the feature comparison chart for the full list of features and under which license they’re offered, uCommerce feature comparison.

 

uWebshop e-commerce for Umbraco

uWebshop came about during the later days of version 4 of the Umbraco CMS, and quickly became known as being an alternative to uCommerce.  

It has a domain based licensing model, starting at 299 EUR and up to 1,599 EUR with a year of support.  Support packages can be purchased separately, and certification courses are also offered.

uWebshop has a strong set of features:

• Custom layouts and templates
• Unlimited stores
• Unlimited categories
• Unlimited products and variants
• Promo and discounts support
• Shipping and payment provider support
• Heaps more …

You can check out the complete list here, uWebshop features.

 

Tea Commerce - Expect Simplicity

Tea Commerce came about after both uCommerce and uWebshop.  Its claim to fame is its many development APIs to support almost any type of online solution you may want.  These APIs include JavaScript (jQuery), Razor, XSLT and .NET.

It has one license type and is priced at 349 EUR.

Features include:

• Multiple stores
• Brand stores
• Unlimited categories, products, variant and related products
• Multiple languages
• Country, regions and states segregation
• Multiple payment providers out of the box
• and… more

The complete list as well as some good info about features can be found here, Tea Commerce features.

Keep in mind, Tea Commerce seems a bit more euro centric than the others, however, that doesn’t mean it can’t be nudged to work for an Australian web store front. A developer might just need a little duct tape, and she’ll be right.

 

Merchello - The freedom to sell

Ah, Merchello, hipster of the Umbraco eCommerce solutions.  Don’t get me wrong, I like Merchello.  I meant hipster as in it’s following the latest trends, and that’s a good thing.  The internet world changes rapidly, and solutions should as well, to keep up with customers and their wants and needs.

Merchello is a high performance, designer friendly, open source Umbraco ecommerce package built for the store owner.

It’s an active project and developing rapidly.  It’s currently at version 1.3 and was only officially released towards the end of December of last year.  It’s also built to run completely under Umbraco CMS version 7, the latest and greatest!

It has one license type and the price is FREE, as in beer.  

And now, some features:

• Mulitple catalogs
• Products with options and variants
• Shipping providers support
• Payment providers support
• Multiple currencies
• Orders and invoicing
• Extensibility for your own customizations
• Umbraco CMS Version 7 integration
• and of course … more

You can learn a lot more about what Merchello has to offer on their documentation page.  They also have an example site up, hope you like cats… I do.