It took us five tries, a complete rebuild of the operating system and a total of three days of working with the platform before we had any semblance of stability. The installation difficulty is partly due to the complexity of the products and partly due to their bizarre installation requirements. For example, to run the install process, you have to log on as a user with administrative privileges, but the user's ID must be eight or fewer characters in length - meaning you can't use the Administrator account. Adding to the confusion, Net. Commerce gives you a slew of default accounts and passwords to remember, a different one for each of the four components of the commerce suite.
Commerce comes with extensive documentation and, unfortunately, little of it is printed.
With a product this complex, we think a vendor owes it to its customers to provide printed manuals. In the final analysis, we were put off by IBM's behemoth of a commerce package and its enforced ties to complex proprietary back-end systems. GoldPaint's Shopping Cart Professional 3.945 is a fair platform for building an electronic storefront, but those wanting advanced features or robust transaction processing will be disappointed. Each HTML storefront function is built with a TAME tag that prefaces a command to define a product or a purchasing condition. It's an interesting approach, but we'd rather not have to learn TAME and its HTML enhancements to work with our storefronts.