Which shopping cart should I use? Please help.

[earth-friendly]

Hi. I currently have a homegrown shopping cart that I've written in php.
I've added lots of things to it over time, but I've finally decided that I should switch to an off-the-shelf shopping cart, where certain things are done right, and it is easy to add new products. That way I can hire people to help me, rather than having to make every change myself.

I've been looking at OSCommerce, Zen Cart, oscmax, and creloaded.
I've gotten pretty overwhelmed with reading forum posts, looking at documentation, etc., so I thought I'd ask for a little advice. I am a complete newbie when it comes to these different shopping carts, but I am a programmer, so I could learn a new system and make customizations if necessary.

I have a number of requirements that I'm looking for--either things that are built-in, or have modules I can add, or that I can easily modify myself. They are:

1) Multi Vendor shipping: I have products drop-shipped from different manufacturers. Each one has their own shipping requirements. I need to be able to set up a different shipping algorithm for each vendor (each vendor could be a category?)
And, I need flexibility in implementing each shipping module:
- Vendor A--cases of juice: I charge $9 per case to ship to Eastern states, and $16 per case to ship to Western states, where I define the states for Eastern and Western.
- Vendor B: There is an $9.50 charge for as many things as are ordered from that vendor
- Vendor C: For Eastern states, the shipping is 10% of order, with a minimum of $9.50; for Western states, the shipping is 16% of order, with a minimum of $13.00; different definition of Eastern and Western states.
- Vendor D: $5 for first item, $1 for each additional item
- Vendor E: free shipping

2) Certain vendors have minimum orders:
- Vendor B: Minimum order: $25
- Vendor C: Minimum order: $65

3) Quantity discounts
- Vendor A: 4 flavors of juice.
- If 1 case is ordered, cost is $37/case
- If 2 cases are ordered, cost is $35/case
- If 3 or more cases are ordered, cost is $29/case

4) Cross-sell/upsell: if someone purchases from a particular class of products, I want to increase the sale by recommending a related product.

5) I want the ability for someone to purchase without being registered

6) I need to add some code at the backend.
- For all products ordered from Vendor A, I need to generate an xml file that I will send over to a fulfillment house. I have this all implemented in my current shopping cart, but I will need to be able to take the order information from my new shopping cart and generate the same file.
- I need to be able to take the order information, and generate tab-separated files that I email to myself, that I can import into my accounting system. Again, I have this implemented in my current shopping cart.

7) Easy to give it the look and feel of my site, and to change that look.

Recurring orders: not sure if this is possible, since I will be hosting the shopping cart, but I don't want to store credit cards because of security issues. But it would be nice....

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I'm sure there are other things, but those are the main requirements. Whew! No wonder I've been having so much trouble picking a shopping cart.

Anyway, after all the research I've done, I've come up with the following impressions. I apologize if I've made incorrect interpretations of the posts I've seen):

1) OSCommerce has many of the requirements as community contributions. I saw:
- Multi vendor shipping module
- Quantity price breaks per product
- Category trees minimum order quantity: perhaps I could modify this to be: Category trees minimum dollar cost?

2) I have no clue about how hard/easy it would be do implement the versatile shipping options in any of the systems.

3) do they all offer cross-sell/upsell as part of the basic system?

4) The comments I read about Zen Cart gave me the following impressions:
- easy to use, nice interface, lots of community support, frequent updates to the core system
- it doesn't yet have: multi vendor shipping, ability to purchase without being registered
- Can't use osCommerce community contributions, because the code has diverged too much

5) Someone suggested that I should use either OSMax or Creloaded, because
- I would be starting with a basic system that has oscommerce plus a lot of add-ons, rather than just the basic system.
- But I'm not sure if any of the addons are things that would be useful/necessary for me
- I got the impression that these systems were better templatized than OSCommerce--is that true?
- It sounds like I could install the community contributions for OSCommerce without too much trouble

Please help!!! I need to decide which way to go. I'm totally confused and overwhelmed.
What do you think would be the best direction for me to go in, given all my requirements?

Thanks so much for any and all help with this. And I apologize for the long-winded post.

[earth-friendly]

Sorry about the long-winded question. I think I'm narrowing it down between oscommerce and osmax. Let me make this a much simpler question:

It looks like oscmax has certain modules preloaded that would be useful for me. But, there are certain contributions that exist for oscommerce, and I want to make sure that they are compatible with oscmax. They are:
- Multi Vendor Shipping (MVS)
- Quantity price breaks per product
- Category trees minimum order quantity (actually, I need something slightly different--hoping I can modify it to be: category trees minimum dollar cost

Will these contributions work with oscmax? Any potential problems that I should know about?

I am a newbie when it comes to oscommerce and oscmax, but I am a php programmer, so I could make modifications if necessary.

Thanks so much for any help with this.

[michael_s]

Any mod that works in osCommerce should work in osCMax as long as the mod is not completely incompatible with mods already installed in osCMax.

Your best bet is to grab the osCMax source code and compare it to the mods in question to see what the changes will be. I know that quantity price breaks installs without issues, but I have not tried multi vendor shippong or category trees.

[zaxxon]

what about sts 4.1 for template integration ? does that work with oscmxa ?

[michael_s]

Sure, why not... No need with the STS template for bts though...

[earth-friendly]

Michael, thanks for the response! Will it be sufficient for me to compare the osCMax version of a file with the mod's version of a file, or should I download the oscommerce source, compare that with the osCMax code, to see if any changes were made there, and then merge those changes with the mod's version of the file?
I'm just concerned that some changes might have been made to the osCMax version of the file, in order to install the built-in mods of osCMax, and those changes would not have been made to the mod's version of the file, since it would come from the unenhanced oscommerce.

What's the best approach here? Thanks very much for your help!

[michael_s]

Best approach is to use a file comparison tool to compare the mod file with the osCMax file.

You could also use a 3 way comparison tool like kdiff3 to compare all 3 versions (mod, osCMax and osCommerce) just to get your bearings.