At an internship, I am tasked with setting up whatever PHP shopping cart me and my co workers think is best. I installed Magento, and it looks really nice, but it develops its own MySQL database. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but my job already invested a lot of time in implementing a system that automatically synchronizes a MySQL database with Quickbooks data. That database already has 1300+ items in it and is ready to go. Magento forums are saying that Magento is really stuck to it's own database.
Is there a solution to this? Can Magento Community be modified so it works with a database already in place? Or is there another PHP MySQL shopping cart out there that can work with item/customer database that's already in place?
Unless your company has invested gigantic amounts of money to build their current system, and unless it's heavily customized, then they may profit from admitting as early as possible that they might have gone in the wrong direction in trying to build a wheel that has been re-invented too many times already.
I've never used Magento, but a quick google search shows that they have Quickbooks support, and I'm sure a quick import script could solve the ~1300 items they have added to their system.