I have an opportunity to do a nice site for a new client. They are interested in selling their products online.

Paypal checkout is not an option so I asked her to find out what Payment gateway her bank's credit card processing agent uses.

She wants to be able to manage the pricing of the products herself, have access to an admin panel, etc.
She also wants to offer discounts and gift certificates.

I am not a programmer, developer, php or asp user. So with that in mind, I'd like some direction if possible.

My concerns are:
-installation
-bringing it to life: ie. ease of changing the design (not too worried about this, I'm fairly good at ripping up code and doing my own designs, getting it to intergrate with the database, and then intergrating it with the payment gateways)
-payment system in general

I've researched and some obvious choices are:
Zen Shopping Cart - they have gift certificate capabilities and discounts.
OsCommerce - not sure about gift certificate capabilities
AgoraCart - anyone heard of this? Supposedly very customizable with CSS
CommerceCGI - Does anyone recommend this? Is CGI outdated? It does offer gift certificates

Anyone have any real life experience, thoughts, suggestions to help me wade through this?

Also if anyone has any experience would they be willing to hand hold me if I take on this client?
I would be happy to pay for your time, or trade services. (PM me if you want to assist)

I so want to get my first BIG shopping cart under my belt so to speak. I am getting so many requests lately that I want to expand to bigger projects like this.

Also WebAssist.com is having a 50% off sale until June 27. They have what appears to be a nice ecommerce suite. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for any help you can give me!!

[sigh]

Oh well, I have been trying to keep this under my hat for some time now, but I guess you were all going to find it at some point.

[/sigh]

<deep breath>

try www.magentocommerce.com

</exhale>

phew, wasn't as bad as I thought.

It's a great new ecommerce solution (only been out about three months) that does all the above and more. Not only that but the output is clean valid code that is highly customizable.

you can check out a live demo here:

http://demo.magentocommerce.com/
http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/ - user: admin ; pwrd: 123123

I am currently moving three clients over to them, and I have to say it is the best system I have ever used, ever....... ever.

Installation couldn't be easier, you just set up a mySql Db, ftp the files up and then browse to the setup file. Follow the on screen instructions and hey presto, your up and running. If you want some help, they will even install it for you for $150.

Oh, by the way, did I mention its open source......

/* stew moves out of the way of the stampede */

*Linda pushes Stew out of the way, but turns back to give him a hand up...sorry Stew*

Oh... I'm definitely going to check this out. I didn't want to waste time looking at so-so solutions, but if you've used this Stew, that's already one step in the right direction.

Thanks...

I have so far gained some experience with OsCommerce and Zen Cart.

OsCommerce is somewhat older and therefore there are more third party module available.
The reason that I completely switched to Zen Cart is that it has a lot better separation between code and design.
OsCommerce is really old style PHP in that respect.

Another reason is that the add-on modules in OsCommerce interfere a lot more with existing code. This means that the in many cases the core code has to be modified when installing a new module.

As for gift certificates, I think they are available for both carts.

Yeah, it is so good that after about an hour of using it I cried tears of joy !

There are a few bugs to bear, like English (UK) language support, they use English (US), and for those of you in Blighty, the UK tax isn't calculated properly at the mo, so either you can't show the tax break down, in which case you need to do it manually for your end of year accounts, or you will have to wat for them to fix it. - [you can easily fix the UK language with a language pack and finding the config file]

The top two best features for my clients is that they can set up numerous landing pages for the home page and numerous themes that they can just turn them on and off when they like. So for things like halloween and christmas there isn't any prolonged installation of new files, they just switch on the new theme.

The other top feature is the ability to have numerous stores showing differing products on differing urls, but with the same, single back end payment system.

cool eh !

all the features are here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/features


oh yeah, I forgot to mention the one page checkout which is really really cool, no more multiple pages and therefore reduced drop out rates

oh yeah, and the wish lists you can set up and send to friends,

oh yeah, and it does all the gift certificates and the such, along with dicsount coupons and promo codes

This post has been edited by welshstew: Jun 10 2008, 10:51 AM

I've been using Joomla! with VitrueMart, which is a very powerful open source solution. It does everything of the above, including pick sheets and invoice management.. It's been around for quite a while, so a lot of bugs are fixed already..
I'd take a look into that too..

but, on the downside, it is only 3 motnhs old, so support, although growing, is limited....

the community is currently building a joomla plugin....

that is another downside really, in that is you want things like a blog or forum alongside then you need to hack away at something like expression engine to get it working.

I am also a Magento lover! It's fast, clean, open source, beautifully designed, easy to create themes for, and easy to customize. If it does not have a feature you are looking for or want, you can develop small plugins/modifications for it. It's one hell of a shopping cart, and I would go as far to say the best on the market thus far! Oh yeah...and it's FREE!

I forgot to mention some other very nice features. The SEO is GREAT out of the box. The URL's are easily customized without having to do any rewrites by hand. Just download it and install a demo, play around with it!

How did you get on Linda, what did you go with?

After listening to all the great advice, I'm most certainly going to go with magento. I played around on the demo site for 5 minutes yesterday and felt at home.

From the sounds of things, it's easy to install and use.. so I'm going for it.
I'm going to set up a practice site for a friend of mine and see how I make out.

I'm very very excited about this and this weekend I'm going to install it and play around.

I wasn't interested in the joomla option Mark because I'd have to learn joomla and then the cart addon. This all in one package seems excellent.

kudos.. to all.