Another slightly non-technical question, but I couldn’t decide whether to ask here or on Server Fault…
I can’t say I’m an MVC guru yet, but I’ve built several LOB applications so far in ASP.NET and WPF/Silverlight and am currently working on one in MVC 2, so I do know my way around for the most part. My concern is more about the accounting side of things.
It’s easy to go wrong; for instance, I once got hired to fix a situation where reports on old transaction records were being calculated using new taxes. Obviously I know now to avoid that particular problem, but there’s all sorts of other things as well, especially when international billing becomes involved.
There are packages like Magento and OSCommerce (the latter of which I’ve used with pretty good success) for PHP, but that’s the thing — they rely on the LAMP stack. Integrating it with the rest of the website could prove to be a real pain, especially if I end up having to host it on a separate Linux machine — which I probably will. Juggling user accounts and styling and all that would be a killer.
A lot of the MVC tutorials out there are tutorials in building e-commerce sites — which is pretty cool, but they’re still just tutorials, and I doubt they cover all the issues.
Anyone have any experience in this area?
Edit: Commerce Server, at $7,000 per CPU, is out of the question for me, unfortunately.
Edit 2: Wait, it looks like Commerce Server’s also available on TechNet… not sure if it’s a commercial license though.
Actually, Google Checkout and Checkout by Amazon should work for me. Interestingly, they’re practically identical services.