Shopping Cart Recommendation Needed

[cline]

I have a new client who needs shopping cart software added to their site as part of a complete site makeover. The requirements are a bit odd. Perhaps some of you good folks might know of some off-the-shelf shopping cart software that would meet these requirements.

What they sell are things made of large numbers of components. Customers don't normally think in terms of the components; they think in terms of the things that can be assembled from the components. Thus, we need to show the items not only at a grandular item level, but we also need to show: "You can build this. Here are all of the components required, and here is the total cost."

Would anybody happen to know of any shopping cart software that has a function like this?

Fortunately, SEO for the shopping cart isn't an issue. There are only a handful of terms appropriate for SEO for the site, and these can be covered in a few top-level pages, above the shopping cart detail.

[JohnC]

Hi cline....

We have a similar situation... When it comes to organizing our products, I like to explain that we don’t sell "products" we sell "product accessories" most people don’t search for our "accessories" they want to find their "product" and expect us to list the "accessories" which work with it.

Most out-of-the-box shopping carts do not consider either your or my problem. We have been looking for a new cart for a few months now and have tested a number of them. With most you can manipulate the categories and sub-categories to allow for the types of presentation needed, but it is clumsy and a pain in the .... We have pretty much come to the conclusion that we are going to have to write our own.

You might take a look at StoreFront 6.0, you can buy an open source version and pretty much hack it into anything you want. It's written in ASP.net so you might need someone with fresh skills. We had planned to use it, but we had issues with the licensing and they might not matter to you.

[cline]

One idea I've been thinking about is building something on top of an off-the-shelf shopping cart. It would be a database where the admin could input:

* product name
* picture
* descriptive text
* listing of all sku's from the shopping cart database

What would be presented to the user would be something like a catalog presentation, but the page would include a list of all of the components needed to build the total product, including quatity of each component, pictures, names, prices, and extended pricing.

Perhaps that might work for you, too, JohnC.

[JohnC]

That's exactly the kind of thing we were going to modify StoreFront to do. At the moment we are working on building our own. :)

If you know .net and your client can afford the additional cost for the open source version, I would recommend StoreFront. Defiantly the most flexible and customizable of the products we looked at.