This post is a copy of the entry I posted on NopCommerce Forum. NopCommerce is an excellent FREE .NET shopping basket. I suggest any .NET developer/consultant to have a look at it even before going towards the commerce server route. The company I work for is a Microsoft Gold Partner so they are rather inclined (rightly) to go for the Commerce Server option whenever the client project sounds like an online shop or e-commerce portal. But for any smaller kind of project, I definitely recommend Nop Commerce. At least you have the full source code to play with as you wish and add your bits.

Anyway, I had a nightmare trying to setup NopCommerce on GoDaddy. I did quite a bit of fiddling to get it working.

The partial trust post is very useful:
http://forums.nopcommerce.com/forums/default.aspx?g=posts&t=224

You will have problems with GoDaddy specifically, as you won’t be able to upload the create data sql file (too big – maximum 2.5MB and the files is 4MB). To overcome this, you will need to split your create data to few sql files. Make sure that you have insert set to “ON” on the first line of every one of these sql files.

Also, the installation wizard could not find my database (on GoDaddy), although it connected to the host correctly. i guess it is trying to find the database on an incorrect level. Anyway, to overcome this, you will have to use the sql files in the scripts folder (in the install folder) to create the tables and the data manually rather than using the script.

mmm, what else… yeah, you will also need to amend the web.config manually. Basically either use the wizard or do everything manually. the wizard didn’t work with Go Daddy though when I tried it as I said earlier.

Despite all that, Nop Commerce is excellent and many thanks for all the effort of the development team. I have to say it works perfectly when I play with it on my Dev machine, it is only when you try to set it up on a shared hosting account.

If you still have problems, get in touch and I’m happy to help.