I thought it might help other developers to know what it took to take the raw BVC5 SP2 to a finished Beauty2u.com site.
This is the major stuff but of course there are a lot of much smaller day to day changes too.
I was a complete novice to BV Commerce, and have reasonable VB.NET programming experience.
This project took about 6 man weeks of development and probably a week to load up the 80 products and 20 categories.
There's still a lot more to do to finish the site off
e.g.
Analytics / statistics / Log Analysis
Additonal reports

New B2U Theme derived from Print Book theme with various changes to
CSS files
Intro.master
Default.master
New Header control for the Intro page derived from Header.Ascx

Amendments to retain a left hand side bar throughout the site including new category template "Sub Cat Menu with Side Bar" derived from "Sub Cat Menu"

New Category template "Detailed List with Intro" derived from "Detailed List" to provide the option of having an introduction page at the beginning of product pages. Also required new Pager control derived from Pager.ascx
e.g. http://www.beauty2u.com/shop/ca...clax/Sun-Protection.aspx

Amendments to address forms throughout store and controls to accomodate British style of Address

Devised a method of using the built in category system to create a dual approach to browse the site either by department or by brand.
This is offered by standard by a lot of ecommerce systems but not in BVC5
With our method you have two top level categories called brands and departments then hierarchies beneath each.
To do this required New Brands Side Menu and Departments Side Menus derived from Side Menus with changes to code behind
Also changes to the coding of the breadcrumb trails so that it shows a trail to match whether a product was arrived at by browing by department or by brand.

Tax
This is the one MAJOR flaw we encountered which will only affect European and Australian sites. You cannot give the customer the option to display prices including or excluding VAT in the store itself. Its a legal requirement in UK and other european countries to show product prices including tax throughout the store for consumers (as opposed to business customers). You can do this by entering the including vat prices in the catalog but then there's no way to show a trade customer the prices without the tax. So in summary you cannot build a site that sells to business customers and consumers. BVC5 also doesn't show tax in the correct manner on the invoices and checkout pages so this had to be amended.

Other Code Amendments
Change to pricing display code to show "from" in front of any price in the product lists where the product has "product choices" with different prices
Change to HTML and Coding of the search page to show pricing & summary and a more elegant result.
Changes to the way inventory levels are shown on the product pages to introduce the ability to have some new outputs e.g. "available in 24-48 hours" for products that are not in stock (we can get them next day from suppliers)

There were big problems with the Protx payment gateway (which is the only real choice for UK) but BV sorted this out after some badgering. NB you need to raise a support incident to get the modified code if this affects you

Enjoy