Often times open source support is light years ahead of traditional software as support is where the revenue stream is.

With a $10K program one would think support would be decent.... it was terrible.

With some open source software I'm using, bugs and or issues are genrally fixed in under 1/2 day. The commercial software entities are unlikely to get back to you in a day, more likely a week.

Ron

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I use agora. It is a stand-alone store, with no other site, since it is a doiwn-and-dirty store-front operation.

I got it free with my server and it took a few mis-steps to get it going. There are several forums where other users and the developer himself will help you out.

You can use the template from your current site to make it appear as if it's all one site, and you can put your current site in the same directory on the server, so it is an integrated site.

My site is there for one purpose, to sell goods. I'm not interested in promoting pictures of me and my dogs, my life story, how I got to this point in my life or anything else, so I just have it set to go to the cart as soon as someone enters the URL. But, you can go through your present site with no problem, and they'll never know the difference.

I used another cart for a number of years and bought Security Certificates. Still own one, but the setup is on my old server. You do not need one. The customer doesn't know they left your site and went to the gateway. It's no big deal.

You can check out my site at www.gifts-specialties.com. You can go through the entire process and do everything but hit the final submit, if you want. Then you can see how it looks to customers. In fact, if you send me a message, I'll give you a test credit card number you can enter that will even let you "finalize" the sale. It's just a test number and you certainly will neiter get charged, nor receive any goods.

The "look", "template", "skin" or whatever you want to call it is generic agora. I haven't changed a thing. But, as I said, you can make the cart fit your template or skin. They even have some you can use. I had a successful site on another server and a short down-time meant more to me than a fancy look.

Check it out...

OS Commerce does the trick for us.

Here's an example of a recent OS Commerce integration that we did www.storkgifts.com/home/

It has all the features of a 20K cart and gives a budgeted customer the ability to have advanced features and functionality to compete with the larger players.

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I'm new to shopping carts and not sure what capabilities are common to all so excuse me if this is a "dumb" question. I'm leaning toward using Agora after reading this thread but want to know if it can easily handle items where when someone buys a quantity greater than one, the 2nd and additional quantities are at a lower price. I'm going to be offering custom posters where the work is in the creation so there would be a higher price for the first copy, and additional copies would be much cheaper. Or would my shopping cart be simpler if I charge separately for the processing and the prints?

With Agora you can have a dropdown box with quantity breaks, size options, etc. Actually pretty versatile. My only problem is I can't make wholesale customers tax exempt. I haven't spent a lot of time trying, so it might be possible. Not enough hours in the day.

I hope this doesnt sound silly but I just build my own shopping carts. They are very simple to make. That way all you need is a provider to handle your SSL needs between your website and your account!

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I personaly think x-cart is one of the best shopping cart solution
recently I have set up 3 shopping cart sites to demonstrate to my potential client, they can be found at:
http://leafshoppingcart.viperhosting.net/1/home.php
http://www.leafshoppingcart.viperhosting.net/2/catalog/
http://www.leafshoppingcart.viperhos...xcart/home.php
the 1st one is based on WebAssist
the 2nd one is based on osCommerce, an open source ecommerce solution, quite well known
the 3rd one is based on x-cart, one of the best, most powerful shopping cart

the 1st one doesn't have backend admin function, osCommerce and x-cart do
you can find osCommerce backend admin page at
http://leafshoppingcart.viperhosting...0420/index.php
you can find x-cart backend at
http://www.leafshoppingcart.viperhos...admin/home.php
osCommerce backend doesn't need login, and no matter how hard I tried to debug it, the email function just doesn't work at my osCommerce cart
x-cart site is fully functional, maybe too powerful, it almost notifies you by email about everything happened at your online store

When you choose shopping cart? Isn't it we need to consider the feature of the cart first? Like the shipping flexibility. Also, you need to see the shopping cart is search engine friendly. Google indexed all my product page as well. x-cart is good in my opinion.

Yes you can do this, you need to look for a "contribution" on the oscommerce website. I think you need to search for 'template' but i know it can be done, because i have done it with one of my sites.

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Hello,

I would recommend you too look into OScommerce, it is an open source shopping cart, it is pretty popular.
You can then hire an OSCommerce developer to have it customized to your needs, graphically and functionally.

You can check out more at www.oscommerce.com