After hacking in a fix to *yet another* bug that I found out about when a customer complained, I was finally pushed over the edge to write a user review of the SmithCart ecommerce module. I thought I had purchased from SnowCovered and could write a review there, but it turns out I purchased directly from Smith Enterprises so I can't leave a review on SnowCovered. My only satisfaction is to post a review here and be done with it.

I'm not going to go into detail with all of the things that don't work properly, and the bait and switch I experienced when I was first trying to get it working. I'm not even going to give you a total for how much money I lost on shipping because the cart sometimes decided not to add shipping charges until I switched to flat rate shipping. With flat rate shipping, I lose a buck or two on each sale, but that beats losing tens or hundreds of dollars when shipping just doesn't get added to several orders in a row. 

The bottom line is that SmithCart is not production ready. Perhaps if they cut 50% of the functionality and focused on stabilizing the core functionality they'd have something. Luckily my retail business is sort of a niche enthusiast's shop and my current customer base is willing to suffer through a very amateurish checkout experience replete with plenty of "glitches" (as we tell our customers). So we're limping along with SmithCart for now. As business and customer expectations ramp up, I'll have to switch to something else.

Please learn from my experience and don't plan on using SmithCart on a production basis unless you are going to purchase the source code, do a build based on what you need, and go through a full release cycle to fix bugs and stabilize the product.

FYI, I just went back to CATALooK. It's documentation is hard to follow, but it's a very solid and vetted shopping cart.

thanks for the tip on CataLook. I'm going to have to switch to something else sooner or later.... I was afraid I'd have to abandon DNN entirely to get a solid shopping cart integrated with my site.