I have a client wishing to integrate nopCommerce's shopping cart with a tool hosted on another website that allows a visitor to create a custom piece of jewelery using a pre-built customization tool. After the user completes the design process the customization tool spits out a set of property/value pairs containing specific details for the product and the final price.
In one implementation I observed the output generated by the tool is forwarded to a Yahoo! shopping cart as a generic item specification with a price attached to it. For my client, I need to create a similar experience, but instead use nopCommerce as the checkout processor. I realize that there is no way native support for this, but I am wondering what the best approach might be using as much of the built-in functionality as possible.
One thought that comes to mind is having a very generic product defined ahead of time that I can decorate with product attributes in order to map the tool output to an actual product entity in nopCommerce, but one important caveat is that the 'template product' is not directly purchasable via the site unless it has been defined/refined by the custom tool.
Obviously, I will need to make some heavy customizations to the current system in order to produce the results I am seeking, but any advice on a good place to start would be very helpful.