Hello Gypsy,
noted your response and am listening...

I am not specifically hooked on Miva - just been working with it for almost 10 years, so I am very familiar with it. And you are correct - it's not open source, however, there are no restrictions in regards to 'hacking' the code.

Miva is very open in that aspect and the API is available to developers. You can customize it (hack it) or develop and sell modules that go with it - Miva supports this and doesn't require a 'cut', unless you sell it on Miva Central. I understand that there is a price involved here, but that also gives you support, which, I agree, isn't always the best.

There are pro's and con's for both, and we do use other CMS's and other shopping carts - but most of our clients like the admin GUI better, because it seems to be easier for them (not necessarily me as a developer)

I also agree that there are many plug-ins available for free in the open source community versus having to pay for them for Miva - again, I think the difference might be support and personal preference. Like I stated above, we use both:)

The WordPress idea actually came from clients that approached us to see if we can tweak it as a CMS, because they were already familiar with blogging - so why not? It seems to work for them:)

So in a nutshell - I can give my clients what they need (in regards to design and functionality) using both - Miva and/or open source.

Just mentioned Miva because it came up in the discussion.

MrStitch wrote:

Actually, I don't know how to code in php, or asp, or pretty much anything beyond basic html.

Yup.... just a wee bit busier with other things at the moment. Don't see myself learning any of that any time soon, as I've only had a few instances where the knowledge would've been helpful.

Yeah.. it's unwise to try to do too many things... I decided early on not to learn any languages in depth... so I pay staff for that - folks that have committed the amount of time required to be proficient.

Do what you do best (management/markeitng) and leave coding to those that do it best.

on the other hand, this thread did remind me i need direct link from tour page to tour order form. rather than just a link from tour pageS to the tourS order form.

got your e-mail and replied. i hope you got my reply. ??? tim

OK Gypsy, I've just been at this for a year (commercial web site design) before that was military, so I didn't have to worry about shopping carts and product pages and checkout pages (oh my!).

But we have dynamic product pages all set up.  I don't really want to have to redo the set up in something like OSC.  I would prefer to replace just our checkout process with a COTS solution that can provide better fraud protection.  Do you know of a good solution for that?

MrStitch wrote:

Everything fell through with the whole Miva thing that I had going on... not really a loss per say, as I wasn't too fond of it anyways.

How about more on why you feel that Miva fell though, and why you weren't too fond of it?

With a proper host, a host that knows the Miva Merchant product Merchant is an excellent product, 5.x being highly customizable in its look and functions. Much better than any free or open source carts, and much more affordable than paid platforms.

PLEASE NOTE

I am reinstating this thread in the hope that we can move forward in a productive manner

As you will notice many posts have been edited or removed (this includes several, if not all of mine). I also realize this included many whose intentions were only to contribute positively, but could have been interpreted  inappropriately.  If you feel yours was unfairly edited please PM me.

I encourage open debate but not condescending talk. 

This thread has lots of good info so let’s carry on….

Back to basics

MrStitch wrote:

In the end, I think we can all agree that it would be nice to have a shopping cart and payment system that looks identical to the site the visitor is buying from. How can I do this?

What

Getting a payment section that is part of your site and templated accordingly can be expensive.

This is because it is your server that collects the payment info and passes it to the gateway. As such, you become responsible for encrypting the data before it's sent.

It usually means getting an SSL certificate, installing it correctly and distributing the public keys to the relevant services.

Whatever the terminology you'll need to have the follwoing:

A list of products
A method to track the users activity and selected products
A way of collecting payment from the user

I would recommend building a database driven e-commerce system.

Why

If it's database driven then creating new products and pages will be easy
I would recommend tracking users by sessions. If you're using PHP then there's a great function that allows you to store the session data in your database.

As for paying - I'm a cheapskate, which means I don't like paying for things.

Who

Because of this I use paypal (i forget which service exactly).

I've designed my database to assign a unique id to every user's product selection (a pseudo random sting that acts like a name for everything they've bought), works out the price and sends these two bits of info to paypal.

On the paypal screen it does have some of my company branding.

Once the transaction has been made paypal sends the user back to my site.

Paypal is nice enough to send back some other variables that i was able to send to it so I can match up the user and what the user bought. And also tells my server if the payment was successful or not.

Once my system has all the data it needs it can process the delivery of my product (okay, so i deliver digital goods online, but if it was a physical product then it'd just inform me what to send out and who to).

Thank you for that clearly written post.  I've been debating PayPal vs. OS Commerce for a bit now.  Quite frankly, security issues are frightening to me due to lack of experience. 

I wonder if one were to begin with PayPal, but at some point in the future choose to change to OS Commerce, is that possible without having to completly start over with entering product information, etc?

Thanks so much for all the good info!
BasketLady

Basketlady -

[This doesn't apply if you're going to use the paypal buy it now buttons]

My post obviously wasn't that clear. The OSCommerce Vs paypay is not a either / or situation, but a combination of both.

You would use OScommerce to show your products and keep a track on who has selected which products. OSCommerce will then send this data to paypal (or other merchant) who process the payment

Ohhhh, thanks for the clarification.  I didn't realize one would use both (aside from the Buy It Now buttons). 
Hmmm, more things to learn about
BasketLady