Ecommerce help

[Lina]

I'm doing some research for a client who wants an ecommerce site. Has anyone used shopping cart software compatible with Dreamweaver that they can recommend? There's a hell of a lot around and I would be a lot more comfortable recommending a purchase if someone I know has actually used the software.

The client also would like to set up something like this (http://www.t-shirts.com/custom/default.asp?sid=177525232052&cmd=display&object=styles)

Basically she wants to have a bunch of stock on the site where the client can upload their own images and/or add their own text to any of the products so they can see how it will look. Anyone got any idea how this is done? I have absolutely no idea and would appreciate any information that I can go ahead and research from.

[Spingo]

For ecommerce shopping cart software, I've always found that it's a good idea to start from the end of the payment chain - i.e, the merchant account. generally, the provider of the payment gateway or merchant facility that your client is using will have a list of recommended carts. That should narrow down your search.

It's also good to go with one of these carts from a support perspective - the gateway/merchant account provider generally has a above-average level of experience with integrating with their recommended cart, which could make implementation easier.

The "custom shirt" thing is usually done using a programmable graphics library such as gd (http://www.boutell.com/gd/) or ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php). Basically, a set of scripts on the server side take the uploaded image/text and merges it with the background image (the shirt). The same tools are generally used to create those image verification panels in some web forms (where there's an image that contains a few letters and/or numbers, which are skewed somewhat - this prevents scripts from being able to submit forms and generally ensures that a human is actually entering in data to the form).

[Lina]

Awesome, thanks Spingo :D