To answer Mike's statement, I think that there are a couple of reasons why DotNetNuke is lacking ecommerce solutions and I think that they're all business decisions and not really technology decisions. As we all know, if you're a good software developer, you can make DotNetNuke do anything. However, as we also all know, doing ecommerce right is a _hard_ problem to solve.
I've had conversations with a few storefront providers regarding DotNetNuke including a very high-profile provider that is slowly but successfully porting theire commerce platform over to DotNetNuke. The "simulated" conversation below will give you a good idea of the sentiments that I usually hear from ecommerce soution providers.
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Protagonist: If we built our platform on top of DotNetNuke, we would instantly have a large customer base that is in need of a solid ecommerce solution
Antagonist: That's true, but we would also be severely limiting ourselves to only DotNetNuke. Unless write write a whole lot of "wrapper" code, there is not a clean way to manage a DotNetNuke and non-DotNetNuke version of the same platform.
Protagonist: That is true, but DotNetNuke makes doing things so much easier, this will give us an easy development platform and make our customer's lives easier.
Antagonist: It does make things easier, but that changes our customer base. Right now we're dealing with highly-trained IT departments who have highly trained project managers, graphics designers, software developers, and content writers all on staff. Sure, some of those people exist in the DotNetNuke ecosystem, but it looks like most of the people working with DotNetNuke are 1-2 man shops (and they might not even be developers!) who do not have the resources or the expertise that our normal customers do. DotNetNuke users will expect ecommerce to be easy, but that's not possible because ecommerce is not easy!
Protagonist: I see your point, but with DotNetNuke, our customers can leverage a full community of pre-built skins, modules, providers, URL rewriters and more! This instantly makes our platform much more flexible.
Antagonist: Yes, but it also makes doing technical support a nightmare. If someone installs an authentication provider or a URL rewriter into their site, that can significantly change how things happen in the website, and of course, when our ecommerce platform does not work with some third-party component, we're going to get blamed, flamed, and crucified by these novices.
Protagonist: Well, if we went with DotNetNuke, at least we would have all of the underlying framework code built for us so we can focus on our modules. This will save us lots of time and money.
Antagonist: You're exactly right, but what happens when an upgrade, new feature, or bug in DotNetNuke causes our solution to stop working? What do we do then? DotNetNuke users rush to upgrade and never test stuff. I can not get SVN or TFS access, nighly builds, or roadmap and release dates are always tenative. I need to know that our product will always work with every version of the platform, I need to plan our product launches and feature roadmap and I need to execute our business goals and strategic marketing objectives. Currently I can not do that in DotNetNuke because of all of the unknown variables.
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As a business owner, but also as a developer, DNN user, and someone who has intimately tied themselves to the project (with a name like PowerDNN, it is really hard to get into joomla hosting. :D ), I can understand the challenges facing a company wanting to create an ecommerce platform for DotNetNuke. While these are challenges for today, I am very confident that with DotNetNuke Corporation's recent VC infusion, we're going to see these pain points quickly disolve. I know that they have an all-star executive team, they have a roadmap in the works, they have a date set for 5.1, and if their funding was anything like what other CMS's have got, they have between a $7M-$12M wallet which means that they can build DotNetNuke into just about anything they want it to be. I think that we'll see a lot of good things happening over the next couple months but the key is to simply wait things out and to follow the Corp's lead.
In the mean time, if you need DotNetNuke Ecommerce, I highly recommend checking out www.Bingway.com .