I haven’t written much about my motivation for creating the Commerce for Umbraco project but I think it’s time to highlight one of the core goals for this project. Aside from enabling commerce from with an Umbraco installation, the Commerce for Umbraco project allows the creation of Marketplaces. By Marketplace I mean allowing any number of sellers to offer any number of products via a common interface. (Think Amazon.com marketplace.)

This differs significantly from the single seller model and is (we believe) an area lacking in the open-source space (well, in the commercial space as well). In fact, if you look at the licensing models for most commercial web commerce products you’ll notice that a license typically corresponds to a single domain. If you have five-brands (and five-domains) you’ll need five-licenses.

Commerce for Umbraco is running in the Marketplace scenario at both Homax (googone.com, blackflag.com, gonzocorp.com, etc…) and at the Motus Connect Store (and soon at the Umbraco Store). Obviously the above is two different approaches, but the code base is identical.

We are doing our best to stick to the Beta release of Commerce for Umbraco at Codegarden’08.

-Paul

The latest build (Preview 1, Build 4) of Commerce for Umbraco is nearly ready for (gasp!) Beta.  We've included all the defect corrections (about 250!) we've come across while putting together the Motus Connect Store and also a preview site for Jonas Bohlin of Jobolito. 

Also, we've accomplished a much improved PayPal integration which supports all of the PayPal currencies via either Direct Pay or Express Checkout.  (BTW - I completed my PayPal certification and am now a PayPal Certified Developer!)  Finally, we've further streamlined and further enhanced the checkout routine to catch and recover from more of the most common errors. 

We hope to have Beta 1 ready before Umbraco CodeGarden08 - which gives us just about 5-weeks.  The Beta release will (must) include an Umbraco package to get potential users up and running quickly without having to mess with copying files, running SQL scripts and the like.

As in the past please send us your feedback and/or create an issue on the Code Plex site.

We quietly launched the Motus Connect Store last Friday night (may have actually been Saturday morning unless you're in Hawaii) and then spent the weekend making refinements and working through a quirk with cross-currency payment handling with PayPal.  (Thanks to Graham Rupe from PayPal for help).  As it stands now the store is fully-functional with all the planned security in place and ready for business.    Until we resolve the PayPal cross-currency issue we've opted to offer listed prices only in USD, I fully expect to support our full-list prior to the end of the week.

Over the last two-weeks we've had several vendors sign-up but no actual products listed for sale yet.  So, if you have an Umbraco package, extension, of documentation please create a vendor account and list your products so the Umbraco community can start benefiting.  As I've said previously, having an eco-system of products, vendors, and solution providers is vital to broadening the adoption and further legitimizing Umbraco in the Enterprise.  If you have any questions please send us an email at any of the listed contact addresses and we'll get right back to you - thanks.

Here's the store home page.

Here's a sample product listing.

-Paul

We've completed Phase 1 of the Motus Connect Store for Umbraco and it is now available to anyone in the community who has Umbraco related packages, extensions, components, documents, books, or other digital assets that relate to Umbraco they wish to offer for sale. 

http://store.motusconnect.com/

We've been working over the last four months to refine the concept and approach for the Motus Connect Store and feel we have met our primary objective in keeping it simple.  While we have the purchaser features of the store complete we wanted to hold off just a bit and allow vendors some time to register, investigate the site, and answer any questions that may arise.

The Motus Connect Store will act as a precursor to the 'official' Umbraco Store to be launched at a later date - see the site FAQ for more on this. 

As I've written and mentioned previously, every sale from the Motus Connect Store will include a 10% contribution to the Umbraco Core Team to help support the best open source project on Microsoft .NET.  More than anything, we want to see Umbraco and the Umbraco community succeed in a big way.

Phase 2, which includes the release of the browse, purchase, download feature set is due on or before 18 April 2008 - so stay tuned.

Please send your feedback our way at info@motusconnect.com.

I'd like to offer our sincere gratitude to the Umbraco Core Team for their excellent work on a platform that allows us build out a site like this.  In addition I'd like to thank Chris Cyvas, of dashCommerce, for all his work in keeping dashCommerce going and providing a great starting place for robust web commerce.

-Paul