The current site I am supporting is going to become eCommerce. And naturally they need a shopping cart to support it. There will be some sophistication in the sense that they would need to support multiple currencies, multiple languages, delivery methods, subscription models et al.
However they are not a market place, so they do not really care about multiple vendors or multiple store fronts.
Since the site is in PHP, I looked at a few like x-cart, opencart, magisto community edition and prestoshop. The dilemma I have is that the current site management is very particular about design, and most of these shopping cart implementations seem tough to me to customize to the level they would want.
The alternative is to write a custom cart, which is a waste of time & effort since we are reinventing the wheel (which has already been reinvented a gazillion times).
I want to leverage what the open source community has to give. I feel that the middle path is there is a good package available ONLY as a class/module/backend - without the front end UI so that I can start using it and building it how I want.
How does the PHP community approach this problem. From a solution implementation perspective, is it better to build one from scratch?
I am not sure if anything like that exists, though. I would appreciate anyone who can point me to any online resources that will help me in my quest.
Thank you.
If you cannot find any resources to build from you will need to create this from scratch but this is sometimes the best solution as it will be to the project specification.
But my best advice is to look how other cart systems are built and expand and implement functionality, like you said don't reinvent the wheel.
When completed, its always a good idea to upload the project on platforms such as github.com so other people in the same situation can use your code.