Hi,

The company I work for wants to create an online shopping tool/order form and the suggestion is currently to use the Salesforce Customer Portal or perhaps the Sites section.

Ideally, the order itself would go into Salesforce as a Opportunity or Quote and the products as line items to one of those objects. However, we are 99% certain that its not possible for a portal/authenticated site user to access these objects (even via an Apex script) since portal/site profiles do not provide access to these objects. Our current thought of a workaround is to simply duplicate the objects so we have our own custom versions of them. Even though this would work, it seems a bit odd that we are creating custom objects for something that Salesforce provides for you as standard. 

If anyone has any suggestions or tips on how to go around this, we would love to hear them.

Thanks

Warren