I’ve just taken on a client who is 6 months into the development of her website. The current developers promised the site finished in 6 to 8 weeks with a full online shopping experience for local and international customers. They are nowhere near achieving that goal.

This has taken her half a year and cost close to $15000, because the developers have basically reinvented the wheel. I can’t believe people still do that in this day and age. Granted, the client does have some specific needs - but, if they had chosen any one of these existing cart solutions, they would be where they are today but six months ago. The rest of their time could have been spent optimizing work flow, adding eye candy and making sales. In relation to this figure, $600, even $2000 for an out of the box solution is peanuts, compared to the time and hassle of building one from the ground up.

However the client has one specific need:

1. There needs to be a way to interface with a distributor. So, rather than having an area in the backend for distributors to view orders, the system must dynamically interact with their system to keep orders and inventory synchronized.

None of the systems I’ve looked at seem to address this one issue. Are there any carts that let you add a logical step to the ordering process to synchronize with an external system? Would it be easy to hand code such a system?

I’m considering Cube Cart with some custom modifications, and I’m also looking at Magento. Are these two products good candidates for custom coding if required, or will they support interfacing with external stock control and order processing systems?

Cheers for this very informative thread!

I finally bought Viart Shopping Cart after investigating tons of shoppings carts from paid to Free.

Viart is fast and stable and it has all the features I require.

You should take a look at Viart, it really is a monster of a product.

http://www.viart.com

I finally bought Viart Shopping Cart after investigating tons of shoppings carts from paid to Free.

Viart is fast and stable and it has all the features I require.

You should take a look at Viart, it really is a monster of a product.

Kudos to all you who actually read through all of it - I did make this post:
http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2007/05/21/shopping-cart-roundup/
that summarized what had been written in the comments at the time I posted that - but to keep on top of it would mean giving up my day job! LOL!

I can turn off comments so it doesn’t get any more “messy” - but I don’t think that would be helpful either. So it’s a mess. I apologize.

Just an update about zencart, now the zencart template is table free and is completely controlled through CSS.

My main goal is to find a cart that has the feature “repeat last order”
I don’t mean the ability to just view history. Ability for customer login and one click to “repeat last order” would be great! Or… allow a returning customer to go to a previous order and reorder part or all of that order?

I too have just read this blog and found it both helpful and confusing. Something that may be helpful is to direct comments to different groups of users.

Programmers
Developers
Hackers {courageous}
Hackers {timid}
Novices
No Computer Skills

What may be a great cart for one group may be unusable to another so………
……where is a cart that has “repeat last order” feature?

Signed ,
Hacker {courageous}

I also have to comment on pour John Lerner and his mess with Pinnacle Cart. Is this for real? I mean come on Pinnacle, we are not living in dark ages 15 century, where King’s and Pope’s could do whatever they wanted to a peasant. Scary beyond belief.

Now to my own problem and I am looking for suggestions from all of you, even from “dark ages crew ;-)”

The idea is an reversed shopping cart, no sales, no shipping just pure old fashioned advertising site. The only thing that a user can do is “window shopping” products, menus, stores and to register for an e-mail about new items say every day, week, 2 weeks and so on. Perhaps a rating system also.

Now for the delicate mater, the backend is where the stores are going to make the input with pictures, price, dates, product description with of course their profile: phone, address, fax, city and so on. When they are done with the input they should immediately have a total cost and of course the means of payment. All what they input is adding to their profile so they can easy check the inputs history.

Is there such (free) application out there? Should I try something like Joomla or Drupal or perhaps one could make some modification in Zen Cart for instance?

Feel free to mail me if it’s more convenient at avramovic.d@gmail.com

Yours humble Dragan