Cart recommendation

[Gayle_P]

I'm looking for a new shopping cart for a small client. The client has about 2000 products in a mySQL database. The site is written in php and has fairly low traffic. We do not want to rewrite the site or the database; we will probably use PayPal Pro as the payment processor. I only do web design part time, so we prefer to purchase a product with good support, not write the cart. We just want the product to collect the client info, calculate the charges, and integrate with PayPal Pro. We do want to give the cart pages the look and feel of our site. I want to buy from a company that provides good support.

Any recommendations?

[lammert]

Hi Gayle_P, first of all Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

We are not often recommending specific products here, but I have some general advice which may help you in the right direction.

Looking at the type of integration you are searching for, Google Checkout might have been a good solution as it was a combination of shopping cart and payment processor. The product is however discontinued [webmasterworld.com], and is no option to use anymore. But the one-sided decision of Google to stop their services may be a warning to you and your client about using a third party package. You wrote that that the site and database should not be rewritten to connect to the cart, which indicates that you want to connect to it through an API provided by the cart supplier. Changes in that API will cause malfunction of the whole site so you have to be careful about that. And just as with Google, if the company decides to stop support, it may have significant consequences also.

Having a cart integrated in the database and site will give less problems in the long run because site, data and checkout are one system, but may cause more problems to get everything running smoothly.

Not saying that you should implement your own cart into the site, but you have to realize that each solution has pros and cons.

[Gayle_P]

Hi Lammert, thanks for the good information.You've also reminded me that I need to remind my client, as part of our written agreement, that tools change over time, and it is just to be expected that a site will need adjustments periodically.

After a lot of looking about, I haven't found a cart that will just 'do the math' without having us recreate our database and use their code to arrange products on the page. I've talked to ecommercetemplates and have been researching squirrelcart. I've seen mixed reviews on ecommercetemplates' support, something I need at my modest skill level.But they are willing to import our date into their database, which will save us a huge amount of time.

[Marshall]

ecommercetemplates

Have been using them on several sites for years. IMHO good cart.

Marshall