Ok, my www.babyslingoutlet.com site has its SSL cert installed and everything except for the products (lol) is ready to go!

A quick bit of background on me: I was a web programmer and loved working in ASP.NET, so naturally I will only look at .NET shopping cart ecommerce platforms. My first - www.storefront.net was launched in March 2005. They concentrate on flashy marketing but the service was terrible. The product also lacked in what I wanted. Next up was BVC5, which I launched about a year ago in February 2007. Much, much better! Very SEO-friendly, developer-friendly and extremely responsive development team. A few other Storefront.net users followed me.

However, there are some major features that I thought would be in the product by now STILL missing. I need product kits/bundles, gift-wrapping options, and AJAX-everywhere. :) Aside from a little AJAX, BVC5 doesn’t have any of that, and no gift registry, or easily maintainable gift cards/certificates.

I am about to launch www.babyslingoutlet.com using www.aspdotnetstorefront.com. What appealed to me was their nice store user interface, and gift registry options. I’ll try it out with my outlet store and report back.

Today I just noticed that AbleCommerce (http://www.ablecommerce.com/)  came out with version 7.0. With a slick new website homepage and even an improved user shopping cart design, I am hooked! So far, it has everything I wanted except for highly-customizable URLs but that could be in the works.

Here’s a sample demo site that was created for me in just a few seconds, it will work for 30 days from today:

http://ac7.ablecommerce.com/700029074207/DIDYMOS-Waves-Baby-Wrap-P44.aspxI love it can show product inventory, AJAX so it updates the photos, price from the swatches right out of the cart. BVC5 does this but not from swatches. Yet another highly desirable Able Commerce feature is when adding a product to your cart, you can first choose a print, and then dynamically the page will show what sizes are available! Sooo nice and a feature I always wanted.The Product Rating system is more thorough - allows for Name, Location, and Title along with Rating and Review. BVC5 only allows Rating and Review. Just a sample of little things that I like.

I love the improved Wish Cart. On the “wish list” you can set Priority and Comment for each item! I’m pretty positive their Wish List is a workable Gift Registry. :) Something I also love is separate Gift Options for each product, and you can see photos of different gift wrap colors. Easily put a free Gift message with no gift wrap, or add gift wrap for a certain amount. As a baby shop that has alot of baby shower gifts people buy, this is really needed! And on the same Checkout page, if you have multiple items in your cart, you can ship them to different addresses. Storefront.net did this, but I never saw that BVC5 offered this feature. And our customers did indeed use the ship to different addresses feature when we had it, so this was missed! It even allows for special Delivery Instructions via a note with the order.

The checkout process seems to be all on one page, which is pretty cool.

Well, I didn’t intend this to be such a long “review”, but I’ll definitely add more to this as I play more with Able Commerce and Aspdotnetstorefront. So far, Able Commerce has my best vote out of all the top 4 ASP.NET shopping carts!

Ok, really, I’m a terribly geeky gal, ever since I got my first computer about 10 years ago.

I play with beta code and build websites using it before most people have heard of it. I experiment with the latest software. And the shopping cart I am currently using for Attached to Baby shop is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. I was one of the first “big” shops to use it once it was released a year ago, and the first to apply their service packs.

This weekend Service Pack 3 was released and I planned it all and the update went smoothly, only 10 minutes down to apply the updates and do quick tests. The BVCommerce team was fast in helping me with any issues/bugs I found, and I really love this shopping cart. I hope to talk more about them in the future. I have used Storefront.NET and they put all their money into flashy advertising, but I felt none was invested in making their customers happy. BVC is the opposite, they could benefit from a prettier site, but wow, am I impressed with being able to chat with them and got problems fixed, usually within minutes or hours!

I feel they could have done a better job pre-testing, but I guess sometimes you just need a live shop to find those bugs. So the past day my search was useless, return RMA’s cannot be generated, my categories weren’t returning my products, but returning inactive ones I don’t want customers to see. But, within a day or just hours of posting these issues, they’ve all been resolved!

And though due to the site issues that made it hard to find things for a day, we still had four nice orders, all over $200! One was over $300, and one was over $400. Thank you, it saved my day. :)

 Now, back to going through the 200 emails that keep piling up for the $1000 Giveway Photo Contest. I’ll leave you with one of my current favorites, no make that 2 favorites:

507 - FreeHand Brocade Mei Tai  516 - Leo Marine Storchenwiege and Blue eyes

Maybe I’m biased, but the first one is a FreeHand Mei Tai in the Attached to Baby exclusive Green Blossoms Silk, and the second is a Storchenwiege Leo Marine that really shows off the weave and the baby’s adorable blue eyes!

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