I would bring the perspective of an ASP / SQL ecommerce developer. I spent two years developing a shoe store based on the Lagarde StoreFront 5.0 ae foundation with about 2000 hours of customization. By the time I had the software running, the core was unrecognizable to the original software purchased. If you haven't been exposed to the shoe business let me tell you; there's a lot more to shoes than the laces. For each brand, there are several models, for each model there are several colors, for each color there are several sizes and for each size there are several widths. In other words, each model could have up to 4500 individual inventory items. Yeah, that took some doing. Master product - child - child - child - child all with variables based on the parent. (Also created the image minder that created the detail image and two thumbnails and associated the images with the database and also created a product creation grid to simplify the creation and activation of new products based on the master product record.)