What are you looking for in a shopping cart platform?

[savagekabbage]

hey guys,

I'm going to be creating my own open source shopping cart platform, and I was wondering what features you felt were best, what's missing from current solutions, etc.

Right now the e-commerce community is missing a highly extensible, easy-to-use shopping cart and is plagued with ugly table-based layouts. My goal is to make this cart extremely modular, so modifications won't have to impact core code.

[TipPro]

Better shipping calculations. It seems most shopping cart platforms expect each store to sell similar sized items. It would be great to put in item dimensions and have the shopping cart determine what size box is necessary to use in the shipping calculations (I know it would be a lot of work for store owners to put in dimensions so not everyone would be interested in this feature).

[JEccles]

More design control

[Shannonlp]

Try not to use tables in the design if at all possible... What language will you use to develop the shopping cart?

Avoid dynamic URL's or at least rewrite the URL's.