Need some suggestions for a designer friendly e-commerce system

I work for a graphic design company as a web designer and we've hit our first e-commerce client. However, I'm not sure which set of software to purchase!

I need something that not only works with merchant accounts, google checkout and paypal, but one that is very customizable when it comes to designing.

I design sites by hand and need to implement the shopping cart system into it. Not the other way around...I don't want to be tethered in by the limitations of a shopping cart that, for example, only allows you to edit the header and footer. That's too basic for a professional design company.

My friend showed me this really cool one before, but I lost the link and he doesn't have it either. I think this is a good place to ask, however.

 

I recently found Cubecart easy to template. I tried all the ones that come with Fantastico, then decided Cubecart was easiest for me to customize. OsCommerce is supposed to be good, but I couldn't get my head around it within half an hour so I lost patients with it.

 

My problem with Cubecart is that I cannot install Zend Optimizer on all my clients websites! Is there anyway around it?

 

You can either get your host to install it on the server, or I think upload the loader files to the website's folder and use a php.ini file to show the path to the folders, depending on the server setup.

To be honest it's a pretty common requirement these days, so you should perhaps think about getting your host to sort it out or go somewhere else?