Shopping Cart or CMS?

[Industry]

Looking for best solution for a new business.

This will be a distributor website...initially selling 12 products (varying sizes for 27 part numbers. These will initially be built as static pages to get things moving on a Quote Only basis and then adding Ecommerce.

After that I will be adding New Product lines and products on a regular basis. Most of them will be RFQ only and not sold online. Maybe 20% of the items will be sold online.

The entire product line is about a 200 page catalog and all will be added over about a years time. Most of the products are technical in nature with a lot of engineering and technical data (tables etc as well as spec PDF spec sheets, safety sheets etc which will need to be available for download at the part number level.)

SO it is more of a Content management solution needed with some shopping cart functionality. I will also need a strong admin area for non technical folks (like me) to add data.

Anyway, that is the challenge. I have looked at MODX and Magento but it seems I need a little of both. I have played with Drupal but find the admin area impossible.

And of course SEO is VERY important as well.

Any input will be appreciated.

[mvander]

I would go for the shopping cart right off the bat myself. It can be difficult and expensive to add it on later.

[lorax]

It sounds to me like this is more of a CMS issue with some custom programming or a plugin to handle RFQs and the ecomm portion.

[digitalv]

Take a look at Cartooga, I think it will do exactly what you need. Products can be added to cart or quote request (you can configure this individually for each product, so some can be cart only, quote only, or both), and it supports post-purchase downloads so you could send out your manuals etc. and there is a built-in content management system for creating web pages. There are some videos on the site that demo these features.