Service Shopping Cart... no eye sore

[FFS]

I need a shopping cart that can be customized as a service (recurring billing, no quantity...) typical of a hosting company... but it won't be used for one. We are a high-end design company and we are launching a sub company that needs to look like it came from us in every aspect. Every cart layout so far looks like a total eye sore. I'm having a very hard time finding one that can be customized to the degree we need. Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations? Preferably in ASP or VB.Net. Many Thanks

Shawn Kallner
President/Founder
Final Fusion Studios
321.945.5600
skallner@finalfusion.com

[Brangwyn]

total eye sore is probably fairly subjective what I like might be totally ugly for you, but still I'd have to say CandyPress is what your looking for, easily customised and you can fairly easily build your own presentation layer to customise the look of the storefront.

[generic]

Yes I agree, I have been able to customize CP to my layouts so far with very little that could not be done.

Just takes a little time to learn the product, as they all do, but you cant go wrong with the low price.

[FFS]

Subjective yes, but from a developer prospective the standards should be pretty high. I'm not looking for a mom and pop solution. I can't count the number of phone calls I've made and I've had them say "You don't like our front-end? What is wrong with it?" and I reply "What's right with it?".

I looked at Candy Press... its clean enough to where we can work with it and cycle out some graphics... but I couldn't find a recurring billing(we are going to have 1,000's of recurring transactions every month, so we need a cart that can tell the gateway its recurring rather than manualy type it in) option and it really insists on treating products as tangible items and leaves little for services, where I could charge a setup AND monthly fee. I also need to be able to send out customized rich HTML e-mails upon signup and setup.

The price is certainly nice I'm willing to spend to get everything we need though. Any others?

Shawn Kallner
President/Founder
Final Fusion Studios
321.945.5600
skallner@finalfusion.com

[Brangwyn]

Very few shopping carts I've ever used support recurring billing, it's actually a fairly unusual thing to want to have in an ecommerce store, normally your selling products with a one time fee i.e books, DVD's etc etc.

So I suspect no matter what avenue you take your going to have to do work to get recurring billing in, I'd be tempted to perhaps write from scratch myself.

[TheDesigners]

Originally Posted by FFS

Subjective yes, but from a developer prospective the standards should be pretty high...

I took a peek at your site. Nice graphics. The text is a bit fuzzy and somewhat difficult to read (kinda small) on my monitor. Did you do the whole thing in Flash? I found working with text and importing graphics into Flash can be a tricky ordeal - especially keeping them sharp.

Why not do your cart with Dreamweaver & Coldfusion? That way you can get things to look just the way you want. Just a suggestion...

[Silverbug]

Yeah it is a little hard on the eyes. had to drop to 800x600 to read it. Nice design tho.

I would say no matter which cart you go for your bound to have a write a lage chunck of code to do the recuring stuff.

If you do have any luck let us know, im sure there are a bunch of us on here that may want to do the same/similar thing

[achabot]

I've had good results with www.ecommercetemplates.com. They also have a froogle export feature plus other add ons.

[generic]

your site on vortechs servers? took over 30 seconds to download on my cable modem. I thought something was messed up. Are those real big flash files?

I definitely like the look, but would have left long before it finished loading if I was a 56k customer. Never know, might just be slow on my end today, but just a fyi for you. Hope my insights help.

[FFS]

It is definately slow on your end if it took 30 over cable. Should take about 4-6 seconds on cable... and its not geared toward dial-up at all being most of our clients are CEO's on a T3 line. Text too small is no stranger to our suggestions box. However, big text looks clumsy so what you see is a comprimise between the two. Imagine what I see on my 1400 15.4" laptop screen. I perfer to use full flash over others because it usually cuts the file size by a good 30-40% image by image. The FFS site is kind of a hybrid than full flash because it uses a HTML based layout, but all the content is in flash panels. We launched two other sites this month Highline Wheels Corporation (hlwcorp.com) and RealtyPeak.com (Sept 1) if your looking for more fireworks. RealtyPeak has all the fancy effects and its dial-up and text friendly .

Back to this shopping cart thing. I really like ColdFusion and it was my original serverside choice, but it costs us a fee per domain and this cost just isn't feasible over the amount of domains we need to integrate together. I really would rather not get into hand coding features into the shopping cart because, when I give the build from scratch order it usually 1. takes a really long time and 2. its so good we brand it and start selling it and I don't want to lose track of our current objectives. I can probably live without the recurring billing for now but I need something that can accept service add-on features and not just a single casted in stone price... so we can put setup fees and any extra feaures they may need into one price. Any one know of an option based cart where the final price is TBD until you select options?

Shawn Kallner
President/Founder
Final Fusion Studios
321.945.5600
skallner@finalfusion.com

[Brangwyn]

Actually was pretty slow for me too on a 10Mbit cable connection, probably a good half minute to load the main site.

But back to the shopping cart.

With CandyPress you can add options to products such like Setup fees etc .. I was very close to using it myself as a frontend to HSphere for signups, still might once the API is up and running.

[TheDesigners]

I thought the slow loading was on my end...

You're not going to find a perfect solution out of the box. Resolve yourself to customizing a cart like CandyPress (never tried CP myself, but I would trust Brangwyn on this) or build your own. There are also several decent carts available from Macromedia Exchange:

http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm

Many offer a good starting point and range in price $0 to $700.00. The recurring billing you'll most likely have to do yourself.

...Any one know of an option based cart where the final price is TBD until you select options?

Totaling an order based on customer selections & options is just what a shopping cart does. Can't see you running into any problems here.

[FFS]

When I'm at home the site takes 4 seconds to load and thats on standard Roadrunner.

It looks like I'm going to have to setup up the options as separate items and then use the virtual gateway and manually tell it which prices are reccurring.

Only remaining problem I see with setting up the package bases as seperate items is users aren't supose to be able to buy multiple base packages in one transaction. Any carts with IF/Then options that can see since one item is in the cart... another cannot be? Either have to do it this way or setup the base as one item and then have it somehow specify which of the base packages they selected.

Shawn Kallner
President/Founder
Final Fusion Studios
321.945.5600
skallner@finalfusion.com

[dpyers]

Took 10-15 seconds for me. - 1.5 DSL, East Coast US. Index2 took a little longer, but was active while loading the various parts.

[FFS]

If your taking 15-30 seconds to load 699kb, you can call your connection whatever you want, but thats not broadband. I'd call it ... time to look for a new provider.

Shawn Kallner
President/Founder
Final Fusion Studios
321.945.5600
skallner@finalfusion.com