Shopping Cart With a Difference

[Bathead]

Hi,

i'm currently in the process of designing and building an e-commerce site using Dreamweaver, PHP and MySQL.

I'm looking for a shopping cart that is also based around PHPand MySQL that:
1. Is template free/template minimal and easy to integrate.
2. Allows for custom purchases. I can see how we will add to the DB but we need the shopping cart be 'easily' configured to accept these 'on the fly' items.

We have seen many out there that seem to be template driven or ASP etc.

Can anyone point us in the right direction?

thanks,
Mick

[Ozzy]

Hi Mick,
You will find that unless you go bespoke pretty much all ecommerce applications are template driven to allow people to customise the site to their needs.
I have found osCommerce to be easy to install, setup and add in the custom options for products.

[gary]

I think you'll find most popular e-commerce systems work on some sort of template system, either for design or for general functioning (or both). Most stores would be pretty unmanageable otherwise.

You could however have a look at www.hotscripts.com which has a number of scripts available and you may find something there.

[microbe]

It sounds to me that you are looking for something bespoke.

A full blown ecommerce solution is a set of components integrated to work together. You need:

1) a shop front
2) a shopping basket to collect your purchases as you browse the shelves
3) a checkout where payments are made and shipping calculations and so are made.

Mostly these are designed so they run out of the box. It sounds like what you want to do is strip off the front end completely and start again.

If this is what you want then I would definitely go to Hotscripts as Gary suggests, find the most straightforward, simple and robust shopping cart and check out scripts and build your own front end on to them.