Hello all:

As most of you know, finding an eCommerce solution can be a real pain. we've scoured the net, learned alot, but questions still arise.
We have a client who needs to get a small shopping cart up and running. Of course it has to be as cost-effective as possible and of course, the client has requests for customization. We've narrowed our choice to MIVA and OSC.

F a c t o r s:

ADMIN WITH LEVELS
Our client needs to be able to have multiple admins with multiple levels of control. For example on admin would be able to manage, orders, users, items, but another might only be able to manage items. I know OSC has a contribution or two for this. Does MIVA?

COMMON REGISTRATION/LOGIN
This shopping cart will be integrated into a larger, info-intensive site. That part of the site will need registration/login features. Can this be shared with the shopping cart (i.e. log in to the main site, and that log in is recognized in cart...and vice versa) We could probably hack OSC to have this functionality, but that takes time, and time is money, and client wants to spend as less of it as possible....

CONDITIONAL ITEMS
The client also requests that some items not be available for purchase until other items are purchased. Mods? Contributions? Also there will be downloadable items...

EASY MAINTENANCE BY CLIENT
We will be setting up the shopping cart structure, but day-to-day maintenance shall be in the clients hands.

Those are the most pressing factors for this project. Can Miva of OSC perform all of this things. If not, other alternatives?

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP!

Have you looked at x-cart? It is a commercial app, but reasonably priced (IMHO). The Pro version supports different admin levels, it has support for downloadable items, and you could probabably put its promotional features to use to create conditional purchases. I found the administrative interface to be pretty straight-forward, too.
Even though it is a commercial product, I believe the code is open-source, so you can modify it to fit your needs, which you'll probably need to do (with any product) to hook up common registration/login with the other functionality on your site. Also, its SMARTY template system can be a bit daunting to work with. But, it may be a good fit for your needs, and you can download a 30-day demo to test out. May be worth a look.

Go with MIVA. Those are almost the same criteria we acknowledged when we made our decision

And what modules, if any, did you use to achieve the above requirements?

did you check out x-cart.com? If they don't have specific things you want in it, they can customize it for you..

I believe Miva would be nearly perfect for you; but you will get what you pay for.

OSC would do fine too; but Miva should do slightly better.

Customizing Miva to the extent you're looking at would be cost prohibitive (for pretty much anyone, let alone someone on a tight budget).

osC will handle everything you need done, but, as you mentioned, the amount of customization required may be a problem because of your customers tight budget.

so, my initial thoughts are to level set your customer on costs associated with this project, or, let them know what functionality they will receive for their budget, and what the costs would be to implement the additional functionality they require...

Check out Zen-Cart. its a fork of OsCommerce but much better than Osc.

http://www.zen-cart.com