If you’re in the market for a shopping cart, look no further than X-Cart. I made some updates for a client who has been using it and I was very impressed. This cart system, written in PHP, is based on Smarty templates which makes it very flexible and easy to modify. It also has loads of built-in modules so features like the ability to accept coupons or processing credit cards real-time are just a single click away. Speaking of processing credit cards, it took me days to enable this feature for the cart system I’ve used in the past. I read the documentation for the cart system, read the documentation for the payment gateway, and modified some code to get the two systems to meet in the middle. X-Cart already has information for dozens of payment gateways pre-programmed. All I did for this particular client was select the appropriate one from a dropdown menu, enter some account information, and in minutes they were processing credit cards. Although there is tons of built-in functionality like upselling, here are some additional, interesting modules that can be purchased. A gift registry that does just what you think it does plus emails notifications to participants. There’s a module to handle E-Commerce sites that want to run affiliate programs and another that handles highly-customizable products like computers, software, etc. At $185 for the Gold version, this product is highly recommended.
Check out Panic.com’s Goods to see a cool drag & drop shopping cart. Pick a t-shirt and a size and drag the image right into a big wide footer area that acts as the cart. Even better, once added, see the image there. As near as I can tell, it’s accomplished all through Javascript and CSS. Smooth.
