Custom Shopping Carts

[HighConversions]

I know a lot of people on this e-commerce forum use Yahoo!, OSCommerce and X-Cart. I wanted to bring up a discussion about custom carts though. Has anyone had a cart developed and customized from scratch? How did it go? Would you recommend going that route?

I've read 100 postings where people say OSCommerce is a good start, or X-Cart is a good starting point, but then you have to customize from there.

I haven't read too many postings where people say they had a cart developed from scratch for their exact needs and if it went well or not.

[minnapple]

Starting 4 years ago, I spent a significant amount of money developing a custom ecom platform.

With a solid reputation in the ecom market, I hoped to make a go of it

In the end, I couldn't keep up with the larger competition, and folded my solution.

[rocknbil]

As a programmer my impression from my customers has always been this: The carts and other solutions that are out there, for free or purchase, only *almost* do what they want, but it's that 1% that makes them worthless to them. Additionally they have a ton of other things they don't need that only serve to confuse them in administration. Consequently I have developed solutions that do exactly what they need and build in expandability so they don't outgrow the original work. The downside is I never hear from them again even as the sites thrive, it works too well. :-(

I have one customer who initially developed a series of real estate sites that offer all the usual stuff, with a free personal web page for each member, and a networking system between the sites. Although it's not a "cart" per se, it's an indication that a site that grows and evolves is never really done. As he gets new ideas for features and benefits, all the sites evolve accordingly based on the original programming. A good ecommerce site (IMO) would have the same evolution, so a customized shopping cart is never really "done" in that sense.

On a personal level I've developed a cart and administration system for my wife's site customized to her needs. I've been tweaking it for the last couple years, adding this or that as she needs it, but the core functionality has been reliable from the start.