will your software fit my needs?

I'm a pen maker amongst other things, and I need a cart that will allow the customer to first pick a basic pen style and then pick any available accesories for that pen, and finally the wood type.
In each case the image & price MUST change to reflect the changes made to the product. This way they get a rough idea of what they will be getting in the end.
Can Zencart do this? This is the biggest factor.

Also how well does it integrate with paypal?
email notification of sales?

Zen cart integrates well with both paypal IPN and with the new paypal/payflow

email notification is sent automatically,

you can setup the pen and all the extras however the total doesn't auto update at least not at this time.

it will display the price once added to cart

ok, can I put the pricing on the page so that they can see what the additional fee will be?
Also do you know of a forestry or wooden theme?

yes the extra goodies will have a + to price beside them.

I dont know of any good theme sites for 1.3.5

Great then I'll give Zen a try. Hopefully its a lot easier to use then Virtuemart. Oh, I have some pretty weird tax codes here in iowa. We have to charge a different tax rate for every city in Iowa. Now I know the feds have a moratorium on Internet sales, but I'm pretty sure I still have to tax them. Will This be a problem?

you should only have to charge city tax on your city everywhere else should just be state

I know there is a way to do city tax but Im not sure how

yeah, I know but IOWA doesn't do it that way. EVERY city has a totally different tax base. The state rate is 5%. Then there is school option tax at a city level and county tax. Some citys don't have either ( each is 1%) and some have both, and some have only 1 of them. The lady at the state after 4 emails spelled it out clearly. IF someone comes here to buy, then I charge knoxville city tax. (7%) if I sell to someone in Indianola and deliver or ship it there, then its 6%, if they come here to get it its 7%. Now, IF I sell to someone over the net that lives in indianola its still 6%! There are over 1900 cities in Iowa :( Makes it rough. And the state expressly forbids "tax included" statements. Also, anything we buy from out of state we have to pay a 5% use tax on :(

Talk about confusing! We also have to pay/report each collected total to each city each tax period. So basically in my chart of accounts I'll have to have almost 2000 sales tax detail accounts! sigh
I'm not looking forward to that one if I have to do it by hand.

Troy

:blink: Have you considered moving to Oregon? No sales tax at all here. :D

Just think - if we'd not let you have Independence, you could have simply applied 17.5% nationwide! :D

But I'd go with Kim's idea!