shopping cart headaches

Hello everyone,

I have been asked to help out with a site that got stuck in many 
places and for many reasons. The site is dedicated to Native American 
Art of the Southwest and is owned by a Navajo friend of mine. I have 
already restructured and updated the "normal" pages. The shopping 
cart (called gallery) is the big hurdle.

The shopping cart should have the following specs:
- user can choose from three carriers (UPS, Fedex and USPS)
- user can choose from different options per carrier
- fragile objects (like pottery) need more expensive packaging
- selected items should be displayed before final checkout
- it should be displayed how many items are for sale and when an item 
is sold the site should update automatically.


Their host offers "MCart" together with the hosting service and that 
is the script that is used for the shopping cart handling. This 
program seems to be fairly rigid regarding how much customizing can 
be done. The person who is working on this for a year now does not 
seem to get anywhere.

Here are my questions:

1. Has anyone used MCart before, and what are your experiences? Can 
the script be adapted to "special needs"? And if yes, where are the 
sources?

2. Could you recommend other shopping carts that are customizable 
with not too much of a hassle?

I have worked in the past quite a bit and happily with extropia's 
open source webstore (http://www.extropia.com) but I'm not sure 
whether this would be the way to go in this particular case.


Any input and thoughts are very much welcome.

Thanks a lot,

Doris




  

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