Money is NOT a problem. Here is what I need:
1- Neat visual display of items. Not text-based. Ideally, I would like products to be shown as images. A bit of text that appears under an image is fine. Not too many products on a page. Perhaps 10-12, three per row. (ie I can set the number of products shown on a page, and additional page links would be automatically programmed and shown NEATLY)
2- Minimum need for modification and programming.
3- Supports a few hundred products.
4- Supports about five or six attributes, and about five or six subcategory levels.
5- Can show: list item, our price, and you save.
6- Can show "Similar items", as nice image links, at the bottom of the product detail page.
7- Supports ecoupons.
8- Supports gift certificates.
9- Has built in support for the usual major payment gateways.
10- Seamless shopping from start to finish.
11- Allow buyers to track their orders.
12- Allow buyers to have multiple addresses (I can live without that).
13- The usual shipping calculation support. Preferably per item and flat fee, domestic and international. A built-in currency converter would be nice.
14- VERY IMPORTANT: either has nice built in graphic templates or easily accomodates being fit into a nicely designed site.
15- The usual administration tools, web-based.
I don't need bells and whistles. No forums. No chats. No auctions. Just a very sophisticated look for well-to-do customers who need to SHOP VISUALLY, not by description. And I want to spend the minimum amount of TIME building the store.
I have looked at tens of shopping carts, from the freebies to the costly, and they mostly look primitive (including Miva - I don't want a list of umpteenth products on a page. It just looks tacky.) I found one that I like. Costs about $500. A bit pricey, but I'll pay that if necessary. It is .NET-based, and my host does not support .NET. Before I relocate (I really like my host and the services they offer), I want to see if there is something out there that I missed.
Sorry this is lengthy.

Frankly, if money is REALLY "not a problem", hire a high-end programmer to custom write one for you. Of course, if you think $500 is "a bit pricey", then ... hmm ... prepare to pay 10 times more. :D

Hi

You could check out OsCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com)
It's an open source php project. Some hosts offer it pre-installed or alternatively, its not too difficult to set up yourself.
As far as i could discern, the features you wanted are either built in to the standard install or available through contributions.
It has quite a number of payment options also available which is handy and all in all it works excellently.

oh.... just as an addendum to my post... you can customise the look of oscommerce to whatever you like... and show as many products (or none) as you want on the page.

You said that you have taken a look at Miva Merchant and feel that its a bit ugly. Well out of the box I could not agree with you more, but the really nice thing about Miva is that you can customize it a lot. As one of it main benefits is that if their are layouts or features that you don’t like in the current systems it is highly modular and you can buy after market add-ons usually anywhere from $20 - $100 one time fees. You can even completely change its current product layouts trough customizations, and you don’t have to be an expert programmer to do this. You can do most of these changes through HTML as long as you have the correct modules installed.

As far as a feature set you will not find many others that come near what Miva offers for the price. And if you go with a host who offers it in their plan you can save the 500 you would spend on the cart alone and put that into add-on modules and features. I have used Miva for nearly 3 years now and for the money it cant be beat. Take a look at these sites that they have listed under their galleria.

http://www.miva.com/galleria/features/feature_prev.html


http://www.xterraparts.com/
http://makeit.bandwear.com/
http://www.pilotmall.com

If money is not an issue for you :) check out Oracle iStore - it's a very good package for a large ecommerce site..


JDT

http://clickpresent.com

www.oscommerce.com all the way open source php and mysql application

you can find a **** whole of contributions and their forums simply rock.

its' very easy to intall it yourself and everything would simply work and then you can get an experince oscommerce programmer to get it customize for you ie layout and addons and staff like that.

I have the same problem as you have, I am searching for some hosts that provide store builder. but I have another concern, suppose I back out from a host, how can I have my data back?

question on oscommerce:
oscommerce doesn't even have a documentation, how do I know how to install and use it?

can anybody give any suggestions?

oscommerce is very easy to install.

if you need any help i will be more than glad to help you m8.

but if you give it a try i am sure you will try it.

just read the readme file in the archive file and follow there instructions.

I am 100% you will manage to install oscommerce.

and their forums rocks i mean any problems that you may occur can be resolved in there forums.

give it a try and if you are still not able to install it let me know in private so i will help you

Solent, Thanks a lot! I'll give it a try. How does oscommerce modify the layout of the store, is it easy to use?

question to dtcm_coach, suppose you want to switch your host, and your new host doesn't provide mira, can you back up your transaction data and load them to relational tables created by other DBMS software such as MySQL? or you must have mira to do that?

Thanks again

Kevin

kevindu the only problem with oscommerce is quite hard to customize its layout if you are not familiar with php scripting language. It does not have a template system so you have to go into each php file and change it's layout.

They are working in it and it is supposed to come out on the final release of version 2.2 By the way download and install 2.2 cause 2.1 is not really worth it.

You can find a lot of help again in their forums on how to change the layout if you are not familiar with php.

anyway good luck