Ive been speaking to a lot of designers and developers and somoene has said they will create a custom cart for my needs. Whats the benefits and negatives of a custom created cart over magento or other open source cart?
Not sure, I use OSCommerce. The downfall for out of the box OSCommerce is that it asks for some things that I really do not need for the products I sell (for example, I don't need people to register on my website to buy a product). They do have hundreds of addons to add and remove certain things and there are various coders out there who can modify the script to what you need. For that reason, I still highly recommend it over building your own. I did custom build the front end though primarily for SEO purposes. I still use the shopping cart powered by OSCommerce though.