I forget this is a free open source solution ...

what you wanna pay us to get it done faster? I'm all ears.. ;)

Cart, orders, coupons, shipping. cross promotion... For multiple sites I mean so their all integrated into the orders. The CMS functionality for that cna just be a db or dir of templates to chose from when posting a new products

How much?I can find a small budget to get a shopping cart, authorize.net billing, and completee cms multi site capabale system.

you say simple, but the yes, yes, yes nature of your reply makes me wonder if it might not be bit more complicated than that..

I'm also not clear on the different sites bit - think that might be intrepreted in a number of ways..

sounds a lot like a Magento/concrete5 integration we're doing right now. It's a lot of custom work, and it's taking weeks not days, but I'd be happy to talk to you off the forums about it if you'd like. I'm franz at concrete5.org