Advice on ecommerce platforms
Hello all. Just doing my research before porting an ecommerce site from woocommerce (ugh!) to something a little more powerful and flexible.
Right now I'm leaning toward OpenCart but here's my "needs" list.
- set different, discreet price levels (not just discount levels) per shopper group
- flexible taxation based on Canadian provinces (can do it via postal code first letters if necessary)
- sell gift certificates (sent to receiver via email) in different denominations
- export customers and orders (including a shipping breakdown with taxes) into QuickBooks
- shipping/plugin API so I can purchase or create my own Canada Post shipping calculator
- decent support community
...and my wish list...
- simple PHP templates (not Smarty or some other system)
- solid and complete template overrides system
- "events" system so there's never a need to update core files and go through upgrade nightmares if I want to modify behaviours on-the-fly
- open source would be nice!
- some way of incorporating blog posts, twitter feeds, etc. without having to hack at the core
I'm a developer so I'm not worried about any learning curve. Ideally the cart would either have a kickass ui for the the administration or allow for templating of the backend so I can make it kickass.
This is a small business, so start up costs need to be kept reasonable. Therefore, no monthly fee ecommerce systems are in the running.
Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide.
C.
