I need a cart (must be customizable PHP/MySQL/open source) that can do this:

1) Needs to be able to download order info in an Access-friendly format (this is easy).

2) Needs to interface with Authorize.Net (also easy).

3) This particular client will never have more than 10 products but often gets orders of 200 to 400 boxes to separate shipping addresses from a single customer, like holiday corporate gifts. The client wants the product page to look like this:

  • the list of products is always visible on the page
  • a radio button at the bottom – ‘order for myself’ or ‘order a gift for someone else’
  • the customer should be able to fill in the address on the same page where the product is selected (the full list of up to 10 products)
  • the process would be: customer selects product, selects ‘order a gift’and sees the address box to fill in. Customer fills in the address, seesanother set of ‘order for myself’ or ‘order a gift’ buttons, selects one, sees a new page (maybe) with a full list of products and another empty address box, and so on. The important point is, the customer doesn’t have to jump back and forth between product pages and addressing.

4) The total including shipping charges is displayed as a running total at all times while the customer’s in the cart (like when they’re entering their 200 addresses by hand).

Does that make any sense? On his current site, he has it set up so that a customer can enter 8 addresses on his order form and then has to place another entire order for more.

Now I’ve been checking around at the usual suspects – X-Cart, ZenCart, Cubecart – and haven’t found any that can do the hard parts here. Someone pointed me to Magento, and this one looks very promising, but it’s beta and the working version won’t be available until early 2008 (which might not be a problem). This is the best-looking one so far…

But does anyone else have suggestions? Ideally I need a built-in address book with an unlimited number (or 500, say) addresses per customer. It’d be really cool if they could provide my client with an Excel spreadsheet full of shipping addresses that my client could dump into a database and ship to, but I’m not sure if that’s even possible.

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