ASP.NET or MS Ecommerce server

[indigotech]

I work for a small non profit company and am an entry level ASP.NET developer. My boss would like me to find out more about Microsoft ECommerce server? He is very non technical and is a little depressed because he met someone at a conference that told him he might want to use MS EComerce server instead of ASP.NET.

Our organization just went out on a limb and Purchased Visual Stuido with SQL Sever. We really can not afford the steep price of the MS Ecommerce server. I think he is basically worried that his boss will find out we should have purchased ECommerce server instead of ASP.NET/Visual Studio.NET.

I too am confused, because I did not hear about ECommerce server until this week, and as far as I can tell it seems like it might be old technolgoy.

Can someone help me out by telling me if ECommerce server is a better choice than ASP.NET?

Thanks in advance, Mary

[poochi]

Hi,

First of all, I have very little experience in hosting an e-commerce website. I was looking for information to host an e-commerce website couple of weeks back and I gained little bit knowledge in the meantime.

Are you guys going to host your website in your own server machine? You said you work for a small non-profit org. You are better of with some e-commerce webhosting company which will charge you $25-$100 (depends)/month and the payment gateways charges some x% for every creditcard transactions. I felt that it is much cheaper in this way than launching your own server and taking care of everything by yourself. MS Commerce Server 2000 enterprise edition cost you $20,000 per license + add other logistic support (server maintanence, etc). Do a through cost-benifit analysis. IMHO, If you are not hosting multiple e-commerce websites, then you would be wasting toomuch money on buying the server and maintaining it yourself. I hope you won't take my word outright and stop your search. Please keep looking and update us/me.

Anyway, you can find some information about commerce server in the following website.

http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/default.asp

Another better location to ask your question is here.. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

Poochi...