shopping cart - ecommerce, should i build or buy???

[digital11111]

shopping cart - ecommerce, should i build or buy??? i'm going to have about 100 products and i'm wondering if i should build or buy my shopping cart. i want to have the basic feature like login, cross and up sell, discounts, coupons, mailing list capture, etc. any thoughts or recommendations?

[Paevo_Kelley]

Check out Cartweaver; it allows to build an e-commerce site within DW.
http://www.cartweaver.com/

[matthew stuart]

If that is what you want, then I suggest looking at www.charon.co.uk.

It is asp based, and is pretty much set up for you to upload and use straight out of the box (or download as it were). There are some things you need to change to get the site to work with a payment vendor such as PayPal or WorldPay, but, it is there and waiting for you and your products.

Everything you mention is already built into the sample store provided, all you need to do, should you want to, is change the design or layout of it. It is also easy to add your own code to, and above all, there is a very good forum should you need help.

Not only that, the extention that you buy as part of the £25 price tag enables you to build your own cart entirely from scratch, but I don't see any the need to when Jules has already done an awful lot of work for you.

I have built several sites with it now, and one in particular is sparking interest from other customers asking if they can have the same. Based on the supplied sample, I redesigned and uploaded a fully functional store in six hours - that includes integrating with SecPay.

You'll learn a lot from the code supplied too.

HTH

[digital11111]

i'll check out cartweaver, thanks! also, matthew do you have any links to some of the sites using the charon shopping extension?

[Gerry5]

I am in the same area - looking at buying a shopping cart, ideally in ASP - I remember Jules (Charon) was pretty active in the forums, but I have no idea if it works with CS3 etc... so I am a little nervous about going down any route til I know the compatibility - Cartweaver looks excellent ... it does seem that many of the old products are disapearing and not being updated (Ultracart) shame, as I remember them all being very good.