I recently installed and evaluated several eCommerce systems for use on a corporate website and wanted to share my experience with SmithCart. My evaluation was done with specific requirements in mind so it is not a full evaluation of the system, it is just my experience with the parts of the module I tested. I tested Smith Cart Version 5.62 and running on DNN version 7.1.0.
My initial impression of SmithCart is that it is easy to use and intuitive. I was able to easily get a store set up, manually input a test product into the system, and walk through the checkout process. I was really happy that they...(dots for suspense) have a manual!!! The manual was easy to read and use. RTFM, they do a pretty good job of telling you what it does in the manual. One feature I thought was nice is the option to add a product to the cart using a SKU in the URL. This makes it easy to create "add to cart" links anywhere on the site.
The limitations I found with the cart were as follows:
SmithCart could not easily change the view of the product page based on a product type (or anything else). It appears to expect the user to use one style of product details page for every type of product. So a baseball bat uses the same type of page as a book about baseball. They told me I could use different buy now modules if I needed to use different product pages but I believe that is basically separating all the data into two stores and everything wouldn't seam together as expected.Displaying custom fields was limited to one of the details tabs on the product page. It didn't seem like an easy task to move them elsewhere. If you need to display custom fields in specific places on the details page, it can be difficult. The details tab did not seem to be getting labeled appropriately when I was testing the custom fields. It worked when I used one tab name for all the custom fields but when I added more than one tab name, it caused the tab to become unlabeled. I didn't investigate this further but it didn't seem to be working as expected.
The import process seemed rather limited. I did not see a way to import the custom fields using their excel spreadsheet and there wasn't an API for importing. This makes completely automated data input rather difficult.
The API was only able to get all products in the catalog, not a partial list. This makes it hard to use the product data for custom modules.
The custom shipping rates cannot be based on a percent of the total order. It is fixed price shipping based on price, quantity, and I think a couple other possible parameters. There is a percentage option on the shipping but the percentage is connected to the fixed price you have selected, it cannot be connected to the order total. It could not easily support a simple 3% shipping.
I found a bug in the shopping cart. If the user checks out twice in a row (say purchases a computer, then realizes they forgot the chord) the user is not charged for shipping in subsequent checkouts. One good thing is that they acknowledged the bug, if anyone wants to read it, http://www.smith-consulting.com/Forum.... The weird thing is that when I reported the bug they pointed me to the "request a quote page" where I could pay for the fix if I needed it immediately. I don't know how fast they fix things like this. Make your own judgement if you like it or not, but it was the fist time I have told a company about a bug in their software and was told I could pay to fix it.
When I asked their sales people about the real technical capabilities of the module, like if custom fields could be imported and a few other things, I was pointed to the request a quote page. It was hard to get a good technical answer that was anything beyond the manual. When I asked about details, they pointed me to that page in the manual which was okay but in most cases I had already been there and was trying to figure out if I was missing something or if the feature wasn't there.
These are very specific problems I found while trying to make the product meet some of my custom requirements. Although the majority of this post is used to point out problems, I do not want this to be a negative review of the product, as that was not my impression. I am disappointed that the product doesn't have a few specific capabilities I need but that disappointment is because the product looks great overall and I would like to use it. Depending on the needs of a site, this could be just the store. It has a lot of excellent features and is easy to use. If you are looking for a store, I would recommend spending some time with this product to see if it can meet your needs.