What Shopping Cart Design Do You Prefer?

Do you prefer to use on of the well known shopping cart scripts or did you make your own? Have you used the deign used by these well known shopping carts or have you tried playing with it a bit to see if you can improve it? Have your changes worked for you?

 

The well known ones for sure. They're well known for a reason, and some people are likely to be more familiar with those right? Though I'm sure people would've liked tweaking shopping cart designs, one missed tag and the whole thing could implode... Without proper experience...

 

I went looking for a shopping cart (and store) setup recently, for a completely new site I was building. I was tempted to go for a separate, standalone script, but I wanted something that would allow site members to upload their own stuff for sale (after checking).

Given that I'd already had someone build a bespoke WordPress plugin to do that part of things, I ended up opting for a WordPress plugin for the store and cart as well. I tried several before settling on MarketPress from WPMUDEV. I paid for the premium version (only $20 with a year's support) so I could do digital downloads and then set my dev guy on it.

I wanted quite a lot of changes to the basic setup - automated product creation, automatic generation of images from post text, a different layout, shopping cart icon changes and a bunch of other stuff. And that's where I was really glad I'd chosen a WP plugin option. Yes, the overhead is quite large (a whole CMS to run a store), but the advantages for me are huge - dead easy member management, a standard platform for development, loads of built-in security and user entry handling, the ability to add a blog easily, theming, etc.

All in all, I'm really happy with my choice. The support is excellent as well, for when my dev guy gets a bit stuck - though he insists the documentation is severely lacking, the response time is great and the staff are really friendly and helpful.