I've gotten my first C5 installation, build, and launch complete, and overall I'm a very happy camper and have become a C5 evangelist. Given my intense interest in compelling layout I've searched for years for a CMS that could handle the presentation aspect as well as just display content... and C5's ability to do that and allow updates from semi-skilled staff is amazing.

Here's my problem. The commerce add-on just isn't up to par. There's a few things, but these two areas are the big ones for me:

- Design/Layout ability: Not only are there not extensive options to change design and UI, there don't appear to be any hooks that would enable me to get at it via CSS without adding PHP and getting away from the versioning/upgrade path. Also it doesn't actually play nice with the CMS... it's tough to surround a product catalog with existing blocks for example.

- Single page shopping cart: Lack of a single page cart is a real downer, and even worse, the UI/UX is problematic for all the "features" touted. There's just no way that having an entire checkout cart grind to a halt to ask for a discount code makes any sense in 2010, making that supposed functionality unusable.

I would be curious as to any advice on how to solve these problems. One option is to customize/code the things I want into the cart (ie write PHP) which is an option, but keeps me on the homegrown path indefinitely.

Another option is to go with something like Magento or any of the few others that might make sense.

Either of those choices could work -- but I'm curious what others have done. I can't possibly be the only person who would like up to date UI and standard best practices for shopping carts (less pages/steps, etc).

Has anyone else faced and found a happy solution for these issues? Any and all advice greatly appreciated.