Recommended Carts for Rails e-commerce app.

Question

All,

I'm building a Rails app, using Active Merchant to interface to PayPal website pro.

I'm wondering if I should develop the cart myself, or if there is a good off-the-shelf cart that people can recommend.

Googling reveals a few options such as http://www.ecompages.com/ .. too young?, substruct (http://code.google.com/p/substruct/) .. which looks like a full e-commerce thing, Spree (was called RailsCart?) ... looks like a full e-commerce system as well.

I get the impression that developing a cart from scratch is perhaps the best idea. Comments?

Etienne

Answer 1

I would develop your own cart, as this gives you most flexibility. Also, developing a cart is not technically challenging and well documented (it is the canonical example of Rails development). It won't take you more than a few hours at the worst, and at least you'll know that when somethings goes wrong, it's gone wrong in code you wrote and understand.

I'm not saying you should always reinvent the wheel, but in this case it's just not worth adding an extra dependency.