Hi, I need a shopping cart software. Frankly, we do have custom built shopping cart that works perfectly but then it is getting too expensive for us to build a coupon software in-house to go with it. When we started looking for coupon software online, we realized that every coupon and gift card software out there comes integrated with shopping cart software.

So, we need to either build a coupon software in house or buy a new shopping cart software entirely. Building coupon software in house is getting difficult. So now we are looking desperately for shopping cart software!!

My products are not standard products. I sell custom books and each book has different properties: A) variable number of pages B) different types of cover.

If I use a traditional software for my shopping cart, it will not work for me because they only work with products that have fixed attributes. If every product in my store is different from the other, what do we do?

For example, If you make a custom book of your family history and upload it to my company using our software, then in the shopping cart, we identify your product ID from the job you uploaded ( software will give us that info- saying, you uploaded a book with a hard cover and 40 pages) and calculate the price depending on the cover you chose and the number of pages your family histroy book has.

A OTS shopping cart software will work as long as you have a product catelog of every product you are selling. Here, it is impossible fo rme to maintain a huge catelog of every product a user can make using out software. This is because the number of pages for any book we make is limitless ( or 2500).

So we tried a new approach: We broke down the product into mini products: One basic book + X of a product called pages + 1 of a product called hard cover. So if you create a 40 page book of your family history, then the shopping cart will show 3 products . However, the problem is this: a user can edit the products in a shopping cart. So if he wants a book with 40 pages in it, and in his shopping cart, he sees a book as one product and 40 of another product called pages, he can edit the pages out. So...that is going to complicate and confuse everything.

So help me...do you have any suggestions for my problem?

Just more info...

1. You make a book on our website using our software. When you upload the book to our server, the URL will give me the product ID of the book you are uploading. The product id will contain the type of book ( hard cover, soft cover). It will also give me the number of pages. - 20 pages, 30 pages etc.

2. I need to give you the price of the book based on those two bits of information the software gives me.

3. If all I have is a product ID and the number of pages, can any off the shelf shopping cart have solution for me ?

How will I have to create a product Catalog?

Currently in my custom product catalog, I have 3 products :

Product ID/ Title/ Cost/ cost of each additional pages/
100/ hardcover book/ $2/ 0.20
121/softcoverbook/$1/ 0.20
133/Wirebound book/$3/ 0.20

Now, how will zen/ or anything work for me with this product catalog?

Please please please help me...i beg you....