I need an e-commerce solution for a website, and am unsure as to where to turn. The client will be selling totes online, and we cannot simply use PayPal because we need to control the inventory. (i.e. Make sure customers can't buy more than she has, etc.)

Does anyone have any recommendations? I don't have much experience in PHP, so I need something that won't be a serious pain to customize or use.

Google for "shopping cart solutions". There are dozens of options, and many will begin posting their favorites soon. Why do you think you can't use paypal and still have "inventory control"?

I couldn't find anything on PayPal's site that stated it's possible to have inventory control. And when I Googled the issue, I came across a thread that said it wasn't an option with PayPal.

The website isn't going to be large. The client is only selling homemade totes. So the site doesn't need some huge and complicated shop. We just need a way to control how many of an item a customer can buy. So if we have 10 totes in one design, you can only buy 10. And if someone buys 2, then the next customer can only buy 8 (as that's all that's left).

So are you saying this can be done with PayPal?

Yes. All of the shopping and inventory can be integrated right into the site using many different pre-made solutions. If the item is out of stock, then it disappears from the page. If there are only 2 left, it will error out if the user tries to place more than 2 into the shopping cart. After the person is done shopping and goes to "checkout", then the information is passed from the shopping cart software to paypal who processes all of their info. It then shoots back a response to the shopping cart software after the person has completed payment with a "status" ie.. Order #3423 was payed for using a CC. If the person pays with some method that takes time to clear, then paypal will indicate that, and your site can pole paypal to see when the order has cleared. I believe PayPal can also e-mail all of this info to you as it updates. http://developer.paypal.com has full details on paypal's capabilities. The best part is that you don't have to worry as much about security when using a service like paypal, since all of the CC #s and other sensative info is only traded between your customer and paypal's servers. Paypal knows more about security than you or I ever will. This means all that your site is doing is displaying available items to a user, tracking inventory, and passing your users along to paypal so that you can take their money from them
Take a look at oscommerce http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/oscommerce It does everything you could ever want, and then some. It supports several payment solutions:
Accept numerous offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
Accept numerous online payment processing (PayPal, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)

There are many solutions available from free to paid scripts and portals.

May I know how how many inventory products you will have in your system?

Originally Posted by mork29

Yes. All of the shopping and inventory can be integrated right into the site using many different pre-made solutions.

Exactly. You can use shopping cart programs with PayPal, but PayPal alone doesn't offer inventory control.

I wanted to know which one is the simplest to use. I've visited PayPal's list of 3rd party programs, including OSCommerce. But I wasn't too impressed with it and read that it's a pain to code. (No offense.) The only one I've come across that I like is Magento. But then it seemed like overkill for my small needs.

Originally Posted by smartcard

May I know how how many inventory products you will have in your system?

Not sure. My client is making these homemade tote bags on the side (she works full-time). After about two months of work she has close to 80. (Individual bags - not styles.) So we're not looking at anything too grand.

Take a look at RomanCart it's a hosted solution so you don't need to know how to code in anything other than HTML.

They have several payment gateways already configured and you can configure and use your own if you want to.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Take a look at RomanCart it's a hosted solution so you don't need to know how to code in anything other than HTML.

This is exactly what I was hoping to find! Thank you! This is great.

I would recommend :

http://www.oscommerce.com
http://opensolution.org/quick.cart,en,9.html

I can help you out in installing the scripts if you want.