A client wants to upgrade their shopping cart system. Their current platform works (although its very crappy -- like the database has 7,000 plain text passwords and e-mail addresses) The catch is they've hacked it for some custom shipping needs (they sell chocolate and need to force shipping methods to warm weather zipcodes at certain times of year)
I've been tasked with figuing out the best solution: (1) upgrading their existing platform and re-hacking it to account for the custom shipping. (2) implementing a new platform like Zencart or x-cart and hacking it as needed or (3) a custom build, integrated into their site.
I'm leaning towards the custom build because, well, thats just more fun for me. But also because other solutions come with dozens of features they don't use or need. They really just need a way to set up products, assign them to categories and have an effective cart system and easy checkout process for their end users. The hurdles would be setting up the card processing with their existing vendor (which I've done before) and writting all the code for calculating the shipping.
They don't have a huge budget and I know a custom solution would probably cost more BUT, it could be easily integrated into a new site (which we would probably include as a loss-leader) which would help with a lot of their other problems they came to us for (such as SEO and UX)
Thoughts? Which route would you go?