> They want to start with about 12 items and have the shop interface w/miva, cart32 or shopsite. These are carts, not merchant accounts or gateways, so I¹m confused.
>And as far as time frame and budget, I could build a cart from scratch. I have the Apress book "PHP5 & E-commerce", plus all the obvious online resources. No, no, no!!! A cart can be deceivingly complex. I used the same book as a sort of ³Framework² for a tangential project that is cart-like. The three layer architecture is great, but upside down. The presentation layer selects the business logic go figure. Plus, it covers maybe 20% of what¹s really required. > Is it a wise idea to build the cart from scratch? NO. See above. >If I don't build the cart from scratch, what are some alternatives? I need it to be totaly skinable... There are a gazillion carts both open source and commercial .Even the commercial are dirt cheap. Another alternative is a hosted solution. You¹ve got to have a really, really good reason to develop a cart from scratch. The big open source cart is oscommerce, which has a reasonably good fork called Zencart. X-cart is a good commercial alternative. The code is a nightmare, and will make any oop purist barf, but very easy to hack and skin. There¹s numerous others. First, figure out the budget and requirements. That will wittle down the list. Cliff
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