I've been tasked with developing a website that requires a subscription fee to access certain areas of the website, to be paid quarterly. It may also be necessary to pay out to members a small amount but nothing is confirmed yet. The website will be built in ASP.Net. Does anyone know of any subscription systems I can build on top of? Preferably with a busy community.
You could try Spreedly; http://www.spreedly.com/
They have a fantastic subscription based system that's easy to modify and an API for you to introduce that functionality into any application you build. They handle all the payments and credit card bits and just fund a specified PayPal account.
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I'm migrating to an ecommerce platform that would help me sell my products online to a wider user base. I am told Shopify/Zepo is an online shop for small businesses and Magento/woocommerce are solutions. What exactly is the difference between a "shop" and "solution"? Or what if I build a site from scratch? Where do I start from?
Shopify/Zepo are SaaS ecommerce platforms which can handle milions of visits/transactions per day if your store is a real success.
Magento/woocommerce are 'own hosted' tools/platforms.
Both are ok to start with, but if you think you'll do good, be careful on the last ones. They might seem cheap at the beginning but they can eventually ruin your business.
When starting it's always wiser to start with a SaaS tool which has no upfront costs and allow you to download all your data (products, customers, orders) in case you want to move to another platform.
Starting with Magento or WooCommerce will force you to have a sys team or a web developer almost permanently doing server-packages updates and so, let alone security, performance and scalability issues.
I do not believe using an off-the-shelf SAAS alone will ever be enough for a successful ecommerce website.
If you want to have a successful ecommerce solution you will need at least a good web developer to keep your site up-to-date.
Moreover, there will be many opportunities such as integration with your back-end systems that an off-the-shelf SAAS might not be able to handle.
My advice is to find a good technical resource, even if it's just one web developer, and build your product together - invariably it's more about people than technology or platform.
A client asked us if it's possible to have the products on their website integrated with Sage Evolution so that when products are purchased online by users the stock values on Sage Evolution will be updated as well. The client would like this to be integrated with their existing WordPress site.
From what I've found so far, I don't think there's anything already available to use with WordPress except the SagePay through WooCommerce plugin. I'm not quite sure if this connects to a Sage client and updates the stock as well.
I found a Sage Evolution SDK that can be used but I doubt the client would buy with that kind of fees. There's also the SData api which I found here: Integrating with Sage Financial Software.
I'm not sure if you can use SData with Sage Evolution.
I would appreciate any help on this, thank in advance :)
As you've already noted, Sage Evolution has its own SDK and does not use the SData standard. Developers need to purchase a developer license and end-customers need to purchase a customer license.
I'd strongly recommend you don't go straight to the database as direct db writes could compromise transactional integrity and the Evolution database tends to change structurally quite frequently.
To use the SDK, you can't avoid the customer license fee but you can get a head start and avoid coding the integration by hand with Flowgear (www.flowgear.net). The Community plan is free and supports low transactional volumes. More about the connector at http://www.flowgear.net/pre-built/sage-evolution and https://developers.flowgear.net/kb/Node:Sage_Evolution
Disclosure: I work at Flowgear.
I'm working on an asp.net web application that has two types of users. Advertiser and Publisher. Both of them have credit(money) in their accounts.
I need to integrate Paypal payments so that an advertiser can add money to his balance. And also for the publisher to be able to withdraw money from his balance (money he made using the website).
I've gone through the Paypal REST and classic API's. Downloaded and browsed the .net code samples provided by Paypal themselves but I'm still having trouble deciding which SDK should I use to satisfy both scenarios with the best experience possible for the user. I'm inclined towards MassPay (in the MerchantSDK) for the withdrawals but I'm not 100% sure of this.
Any help or guidance is appreciated.
Many thanks.
The short answer is that you should use the REST SDKs if at all possible. PayPal's products are moving to that API and once everything is there, support for older SDKs will be discontinued.
I would like to have framework for tracking web site/page usage within company firewalls on asp.net platform.
Want to track hits and integrate with particular feature within an application to understand end user usage (i.e. log particular actions of users in addition to simple page count type analytics)
I have yet to find a framework to do this with asp.net/iis7 internal to a company (i.e. not google analytics)
thx
If you don't need anything too fancy, as in number of visits to urls, and you've got the clearance to install perl/CGI scripts, you could use awstats. It isn't bad for what it is and has the advantage of being free.
If you are down to spend some $$$ or you really need google analytics, you can host your own by purchasing an urchin license.
I need an opinion and advise from experienced ASP.NET people, what way to go.
Assuming that a developer has some practical background with HTML/JavaScript/PHP on one side and some .NET/C#/WPF experience on the other side. No previous hands on experience with ASP.NET - only theory and some read books on the topic.
The task is to build ASP.NET web site with User Managment functionality (user authentication, user account, user buying history, user points and so on) and E-commerce functionality with shopping cart, checkout and all needed for this.
Is it worth, i.e. will it be faster, more reliable and secure in the result to use a ASP.NET CMS system (for example Sitefinity from Telerik as declared developer friendly) to build such first site? In what case the learning curve will be more steep and it will take more time to achieve similar results?
Notes to take into consideration: 1) Price of the CMS matters not very much 2) E-commerce module should be written from scratch in any case (and integrated in case of using CMS) due to very specific requirements
It will be much faster to get an existing system. If you're going to have a shopping cart, then I would suggest you not even consider writing it yourself if this is your first foray into ASP.NET. The security and PCI Requirements alone will take you forever.
We recently got a new shopping cart for our web site and decided to purchase, and we're an experienced team. Our company used the AspDotNetStorefront, and we're pretty happy with it. You can use it for content management as well, and the price is good, but there are plenty of good alternatives out there.