Best full-function cart for existing website

Don't want to change the "look" of my pages one little bit

[climb512]

There are many threads around here asking about this cart or that cart, but I haven't found one that fits my current situation.

One of my clients has simply been using Paypal "buy button" code to sell his 15 products. Now he's looking for a cart that will simply "plug in" to his existing website which will not change the look of the front end at all. He definitely does NOT want to just approximate the current look in an x-cart template. He wants to design and change his main pages and product pages with total artistic control, but still have the functionality of a full-featured cart (complex coupons, upsells, cross-sells, affiliate management, Quickbooks integration, strong backend admin, etc, etc). The checkout page and process can be in the cart-specific template, but all other pages need no layout or formatting restrictions.

I have looked at some of the major carts and most of them claim that they are "fully customizable", but in actual experience I've found that osCommerce, x-cart, and others require a whole lot of expertise to break out of their template based frontend. Ideally, we'd like something that a junior php prgrammer wouldn't have too much trouble with.

Can anyone recommend a full-featured, well supported cart that meets my requirements? Or even maybe the tutorials that I've missed which talk about this sort of thing for the biggies (osCommerce, x-cart, etc)?

Thanks for any suggestions or applicable experiences you can share with me.

[CernyM]

Mal's e-commerce is the first one that comes to mind.

[jsinger]

Shopsite is good. You can add it to your existing site.

[climb512]

Thanks for the very quick responses. I looked at Mal's ecommerce and while it might fill the bill in other areas, it explicitly says that it will not handle recurring payments, and this is something that we need to have the option of implementing.
I'm looking at Shopsite now.

[Demaestro]

Is it possible for you to have one custom built?

Basing on your desire to "seamlessly" integrate one onto your site that might be the way to go.

Shopsite is very good, but you can't just pick it up and go.. it takes a lot of figuring out how to use it.

[edited by: Demaestro at 6:55 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2008]

[climb512]

Thanks for the suggestions. I am looking at lots of carts and the "irresistable force" of my clients required feature list keeps hitting the "unmovable object" of cart limitations.

ViArt was the closest thing I hit on, but we need to use the cart over multiple domains and this is a deal breaker with them as it gets very expensive very quick. Which leads me back towards the open source stuff. We would gladly pay $300-$500 to solve this problem, but i have yet to find the perfect solution.

I have found by experimentation that even the template based carts might be workable, as i can often just paste the complete page code into one section of the template and make this section the only visible area, filling the page. Still searching for the one that hits all the nails on the head though.

[CernyM]

It doesn't sound like you are budgeting enough for the work.

Some compromise either on budget or functionality is probably going to be required to solve this.

[vincevincevince]

With respect to your professional judgement, $300-500 is not nearly close to a budget for this kind of advanced system. Can your client raise funds to cover this through a business loan or personal financing?

[climb512]

I respect your feedback, and I have indeed learned a lot in the past from your prior posts, but I'm surprised to hear that you think $500 would be unreasonable. ViArt does every single thing I need in a totally free version right off the shelf, except I need to run it on more than one domain--which bumps the cost up to $999 for 10 domains. The Yahoo cart is cheap monthly and does everything we want including the multi-domain, except it chokes on the recurring payment part. Many other solutions I have found come to the 98% mark, but not quite 100%--and in many cases I am talking about totally free versions. Even osCommerce with a couple of inexpensive paid mods gets me close, but no cigar.

The reason I am looking so hard is that I can find everything I want if i take bits and pieces from existing inexpensive carts--really, theres nothing too fancy here--and I thought that with so many offerings in this space there is probably someone who has pieced together just the right set of features.

[rjwmotor]

Check out Squirrelcart. It's not expensive and can be used merely for checking out with same type of "buy now" buttons. PHP/MSQL driven with fully customizable templates. I use it on several different sites. Fairly sure it has recurring payments built in.

[slon]

About X-cart.
You can make Design integration it will cost $400-600.