Hi! We are a cookie gift/wholesale cookie company (chipndough.com) currently using the ShopPlus shopping cart at HostPro. This is a cart with very limited features and absolutely no support. I am trying to automate my shipping and gift card writing process as well as add a number of other features without paying the big bucks that a lot of dotcom companies end up paying. I know the following list is long, but most of the medium and some of the small size ecommerce sites have a majority of the following features on their sites nowadays. The carts that I am currently looking at are Miva Merchant, Merchandizer, ShopSite as well as a custom cart. I have received quotes anywhere from $10-30,000 (ouch!) for a stand alone cart and the following customizations. I can't afford to make another mistake like I did on the first cart and was wondering if you could look at my wish list below and steer me in the right direction.

SHOPPING CART WISH LIST

1. New shopping cart that incorporates all of these things and can be customed with other features
2. Coupon -ability to email customers a coupon # that they could imput into the shopping cart to receive a discount
3. Print shipping labels off web orders (maybe after going to an accounting software first) Each order would have a unique order #
and this data would come in a ASCII, D-based or ODBC file format so I could use a Pitney Bowes or Fed-Ex shipping system.
I don't understand all the specifics here but this is what I was told.
4. Shipping and Handling calculations -may be included in the pitney bowes system
5. Print Greeting Cards message onto a gift card (laser print- 4"x 6" card stock).
6. Autoresponders - "Thank you for your order..." sent to customer after purchase
7. Holiday/special occasion reminder- customer puts in all the dates for us to automatically email him/her a reminder note when its
someones birthday, holiday etc.
8. Ability for customer to send multiple gifts to multiple recipients at a time (Amazon.com). In a way that customer doesn't have to
re-log in or have to type all their customer info in again- in order to make their shopping experience as easy as possible.
9. Tell a friend about this site?
10. Affiliate program - ability to affiliate with other sites and track this info
11. Accounting-data import/export to Quickbooks
12. Inventory annalysis
13. Order Tracking (shipping feature) I think this is built into Pitney Bowes and Fed Ex systmems
14. Discount for people that order in bulk - member # that corresponds with restricted area for volume discounts
15. Membership-user ID and password (customer has credit card info (name, address, etc. stored on server? is that safe?)
16. Gift Certificate
17. Newsletter sign-up (opt in)

I am sure you get lots of questions but if you could get back to me as soon as possible I would appreciate it as I have been researching this for 6 exhausting weeks and I need to make a decision.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards,

Mike
mike@chipndough.com