Carts, advice please

Hello. I am aware other forums may be more appropriate than WAP but since my products might be ringtones and videos I thought I should ask here first.

I am having a real hard problem trying to find a good cart system that will work with downloable items. I can see there are plenty of carts selling these products but none of the ones I checked offer a straight solution, including systems of credits/tokens...

Am i looking to have a customized cart built or can start with something out of the box? I thought people here that are dealing with wap issues may be familiar with carts for ringtones/videos/games/ and downloables in general. Thanks.

Isn't a ringtone just a one hit impulse purchase negating the need for a shopping cart solution?

People tend to just buy the one they want I think, if they want two they send two texts...... Isn't that the standard?

I suspect the easier way would be to expand on the credits / tokens idea and let people buy a block of credits, say for £10 then deduct the value of each download from the balance.

Andrew, on the money! As usual. Yes, that is how it should work. Unfortunately, I think I will have to hack a cart for it to work that way. No out of the box solutions.

Well my thoughts on this, and I have given it thought for my own stuff, would be to sell "content credits" at xx per unit, users then pay via Pay Pal, No Chex, Credit Card, etc the credits are assigned to their account.

Then you have a script which runs and checks if the user has enough credits to cover the charge of the download, if they don't it sends them to the top up my account page and if they do the content gets rendered to the phone.

I'm thinking of doing something similar myself and so far have the user registration tables, signup, email confirmation in place. I just need to add Pay Pal etc to this to get the money for the credits and write the authentication script which would then deduct the credits and let the user have access to the (drm wrapped) content.

Hope this helps, naturally, most sales will be via PSMS or PRS but this is a nice option for people who want to get more than one unit of content at a time, it's also possible to add "send to a friend" functionality to this without too much trouble.

If you want an offline brainstorming session get in touch.

Cheers