I came across this useful article on how to build better shopping carts from someone at Jacob Nielson's company, an expert on web usability, a field which I have a special interest in.

I have downloaded and installed many trial commercial modules. I downloaded some shopping carts as well. I had no intention in buying any. Just was curious to know the current state of commercial modules. How useful they are and how they're built in terms of workflow and web usability.

I am just going to hit on one aspect in this post. I was struck by how many supporting modules these shopping carts installed. First the clutter up the modules list. Of the DNN issues I noticed is that modules and their supporting modules are treated at the same hierarchy level. If these modules weren't named properly, they would be shuffled in the list. Plus there no visual indicator which is the parent module. It's all a guessing game based on the name. There's no visual hierarchy.  

It's not straight forward how to set up a store based on the number of supporting modules. Some have along laundry list of options with minimal groups. Or the workflow is not obvious. which setup needs to come first. Are there dependencies between them. Whenever I install a module and the first impression I get is that I have to read the manual, it will be a huge turn off. So huge that the next step is to uninstall it. Remember that I just wanted to see how easy it is to use. I might feel sorry for the person who purchases it and will have to go through the agonizing setup. Even some of the manuals are just a long wall of texts with some bolding for headers. I feel there wasn't enough time spent on polishing the product and making it look professional. Modules which are just a long list of labels and text fields/radio buttons and checkboxes. 

I would have preferred to see an admin section where the admin would load the sections dynamically based on my selections. Or simply tabs. A tab for inventory. A tab for discounts, a tab for shipping rates.. etc. Each tan can load its control dynamically. It's better than a user dropping the module on the page somewhere and then DNN has to resort to dimming it. Every time I install DNN I have to modify the css to remove this effect. I find it annoying. I thought there was going to be a setting for this.

To uninstall these multimodule modules, I have to uninstall each supporting module separately. If the installer installed them, why can't the uninstaller uninstall them all at once!? Thanks for the free bulkextensionuninstaller module.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. This post is really about the link I am sharing but I digressed :)

I am not that interested to go to every vendor and share my info. I don't have the time or motivation to do this. Consider this like a blog post for everyone to read.  One of my earlier points I made is that commercial vendors don't seem to participate in the community here. There are very few exceptions of course to anything. Onyak is one which I can remember. Maybe all they care about is developing and selling their products and missing on the pulse here and reading what customers or potential customers are looking for. Sorry to say that if they don't come here, it's their loss. Let the inquisitive vendor win.