why is shopping so hard for me?

or, rather, why is setting up a shopping cart so hard?

I've toyed around with shopping cart extensions for Drupal for several of my websites now, and while I have gotten several to work, it has been a real pain. The quickfile payment module works well, but is strictly limited in its abilities. There is no cart functionality, so your customers will have to purchase each item individually. If you're only selling one product, say an e-book, that's no big deal. But if you're selling multiple files like mp3's, it just isn't optimum.

I've tried the Drupal e-commerce module, which does serve up a configurable shopping cart, but it is very confusing to skin the shopping cart and order flow. The ubercart module was easier to work with, and includes integration with the workflow_ng module, which together allows one to sell membership or assign user roles on payment.

My biggest complaint about every Drupal cart module that I have tried thus far, is that there are too many checkout steps. With no module do we get the option to send a user directly to PayPal for payment upon clicking on a button. This is a basic functionality that you can build manually using PayPal code, but it would be so much nicer if we could have it ported into one of these modules so that we can track orders internally, and dynamically create product purchase links from within the Drupal interface.

The closest that I have been able to get it is to use the ubercart module and have it auto-submit through the checkout forms until it gets to PayPal. In IE, the page stays white with no content while it is auto-forwarding to PayPal. In Firefox, you can see each checkout page as it is bypassed. This isn't the best solution, but for now it will have to do.

I've also been looking at some of the third party shopping cart software solutions, but none of them integrate into Drupal like the above modules. Zencart, osCommerce and Magento look promising for opensource programs. I'm sure there are decent paid solutions, too.