Looking for an ideal fulfillment partner

[mugwump]

We're a small new media company looking to expand our online gift & reminder service [www.gift66.com]. At the present moment we use VSTORE as our chief supplier -- but are finding ourselves very much constrained by the lack
of creative control over the design of our store and the 'site within a site' format, preventing the seamless integration of vstore with the rest of our site, etc. (if you take a look at our page you can see what I mean).

Our preference would be to partner with a merchant who would handle the stocking & shipping of merchandise as well as the customer service -- who at the same time would permit us to retain full creative control of site design, including shopping cart.

We're currently researching to see if there is anybody out
there who could meet our needs -- I figured it couldn't
hurt to inquire here, and if anybody has a lead or could
recommend some e-commerce sites to help our research we would certainly appreciate it.

Christopher http://www.gift66.com

[jonese]

Chris check out http://www.miva.com i think their miva Merchant might be what you want. You WILL have to find a host though that supports MIVA but that shouldn't be too hard.

[Adam Oberdorfer]

I don’t know of anyone that will manage your store well you stay the creative. You may want to try posting the business for sale and offer your services as part of the agreement in exchange for a percentage of the stores profits.

In terms of a better shopping cart application. Miva Merchant uses a scripting language called Miva Empresa, which is essentially a XML type language. If your familiar with coding XML Miva is a good choice, however you will still be restricted to the functionality allowed by Miva Merchant and the Miva Empresa engine.

I personally prefer using PHP or ASP to build shopping carts. Normally I use a free source application with the basic functionalities I need and customize it. The beauty of ASP and PHP is that you can customize almost every aspect of the application – way beyond what “out of the box” type applications can offer.