How expensive does shopping cart software get?

[tappel]

I've been using X-Cart for several months now but am considering a change. I need a store that can manage upwards of 400+ products and provide the ability to charge tax based on counties in New York. X-Cart provides all this but is basically a work in progress, and it looks kinda cheesy.

I'm awaiting a proposal from a designer that I expect to be in $2000-$2500 range. How does this compare? I sent a list of dozens of requirements.

While on the subject... Can the FQ-provided Miva Merchant be customized for charging sales tax based on a county in a state? If so, that might be an option.

Thanks,
Tom

[dank]

Is that something being built completely from the ground up? If not, the price borders on ludicrous. Even a quarter of that sounds like too much, unless it's an incredibly full-featured application and you're a large corporation... It should be possible to build the tax customizations you need into an existing cart.

Dozens of requirements is a bit of an unknown, though.

If you like osCommerce (you can see my setup at www.abledesign.com/store ), I could chat with you offline and see if we can come up with a modification of it to do what you want. Seems like a dropdown list of available NY counties matched against a lookup array/table of tax levels would do the trick without too much difficulty, although there'd still be the matter of finessing that amount into the cart's shipping total. Worth a shot, at least.

Dan

[tappel]

Thanks for the reply Dan,

I sort of knew the answer before I asked. 2G+ is quite a chunk of change; the person I ask for financial advice told me as much and that it just isn't a justifiable expense.

As far as the requirements I need... there's nothing that doesn't already exist in my version of X-Cart.

I'm doing some research now and I will most definitely keep your offer in mind.

Tom

[Matt]

Is that something being built completely from the ground up? If not, the price [$2000-$2500] borders on ludicrous.

$2,000 - $2,500 might be a bit much for a standard install of shopping cart software, but most clients willing to pay for a solution customized to fit their needs are going to want more than a default install. Although OSCommerce is free, you're looking at time spent setting up a fairly sophisticated piece of software, time spent obtaining necessary SSL certificates (plus their associated costs), and time spent familiarizing a client with the software. A dependable dedicated cert can easily run a few hundred dollars. In terms of billable hours, it's going to take several to get the certificate installed, OSCommerce installed, get everything working properly, and run a few test transactions. Add in technical support and the costs start to add up.

Tom, Dan is a very experienced developer, but it sounds like you're selling yourself short Dan. A shopping cart solution built from the ground up for a large corporation would be a steal at $5,000, let alone $2,500! If cost is the ultimate deciding factor (it doesn't sound like it is), then the absolute cheapest short-term solution would be to simply purchase a hosting account that includes Miva pre-installed. (perhaps between $20 - $80/mo, depending on several factors). Next would be a default install of open source, followed by commercial software (somewhere between $500 - $1000). A customized package would most likely run above $1,000, but shouldn't exceed the $2,500 figure. In most cases software built from the ground up is unnecessary. Such software would most likely be highly specific to the industry/ business it was built for. Think $10,000 and go up from there.

If X-Cart already meets your needs, then simply adding the tax feature as Dan suggests is definitely a worthwhile investigation. In the event that you decide to abandon X-Cart, I'm sure that OSCommerce is capable of handling the features you need. In addition to Dan's site, take a look at two client sites at http://www.valumotion.com and http://www.collegiatefan.com (newer version of OSCommerce, but not yet fully operational) for an idea of OSCommerce's capabilities.

Best of luck,
Matt

[dank]

Ok, so I may have exaggerated slightly... The point remains, though, unless you have a lot of funds to throw at a highly specific and customized solution, to quote from Spider-Man, "Harry doesn't live on a little place I like to call Earth." Since you already have something that works and just want something a bit different (only you know what that entails, the rest of us mere mortals can only guess at it), the price seems a few stratospheres out of line.

That's my 2 cents and change, at least.

Dan