I was looking at the General Store mods on Nexus and they seem a really nice idea. I'd like to use some of those containers in my mod but I don't know how good an idea it is to require other mods to be loaded before yours is useable. Advice?

The Creation Kit tends to remove dependancys for any ESP file during a save, same as it did in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout NV.
So its going to be problematic any way you approach it except by making your mod self contained.
Assuming these mods you refer to are NOT ESM files.

The game engines and *Edit, however, don't mind ESP masters one bit.

The technical question of having a dependency on an ESP is sortof a mute point for the OP as General Stores is already a master file.

Crossi, you just have to determine if you want to deal with the issues of forcing yourself to support somebody elses mod. Your users have to use it to use yours and if they think it has messed something up, they are going to blame you and ask you to fix it. I would avoid it if at all possible. Unless you have permission and are so familiar with the other mod that you can deal with issues and make fixes and changes if you need to.

And don't forget that there are apparently a large number of Skyrim users who cannot read either descriptions or readme files. So when they download your mod and it crashes their game because they do not also have General Stores, they are going to come back screaming about how your mod has ruined their games. They can read forums fine for some reason, so you will find yourself explaining how to download and install General Stores just about every day no matter how obvious you make it in the description. From my experience anyway.

I tend to agree wtih http://www.gamesas.com/user/793970-ch0k3h0ld/.

If you plan on making it for your own use, than I don't see any problems with doing that.
But its always a good idea to get the original mod authors permission before making a 'plugin' to it.

Thanks. The containers look nice but I think I'll take your advice.