Remove shopping cart experience all together

[Astroman]

I know this might be a pretty odd request for a shopping cart, but is it possible to remove the actuall shopping cart bits all together and just have Paypal Buy Now buttons for each item instead? How would I go about doing this if it is possible?

All the items are one off sales that will remain on the site with Sold instead of a price as they are sold and even though Zen Cart is perfect for displaying the items and the person I'm making the site for does want a commercial sales site, they want it to look more personal and less shaopping carty.

[gjh42]

Paypal buttons look more "personal"? More amateur perhaps. You can style the add to cart button, the shopping cart page, etc. to look and read any way you want. Is the Paypal shopping cart page "personal"?

If you are using the product listing page for buying, you can alter the layout and function of the add buttons in a number of ways.

[Astroman]

First of all it's not my idea so I'm more inclined to agree with you. But this guy is selling paintings and is pretty sure no one will want to buy more than one, and I do think he is actually going for the ameteur look. He wants to reinforce the idea that he's very much one guy on his own and not a big business doing lots of selling.

I think the showcase mode is pretty much what he's after, only with a buy now button instead of the "Show Room Only " box. Do you think it's possible to do that?

[Merlinpa1969]

IF you want to use paypal buttons,
frontpage will be your friend...

[Astroman]

IF you want to use paypal buttons,
frontpage will be your friend...

Frontpage is the work of the devil, are there any sensible answers?

[gjh42]

I don't think you are going to get any useful interaction between Paypal buttons and the Zen Cart product management system (to show "Sold") without some serious coding.

Maybe you can set Paypal as the only payment method and get a Paypal Express account. That is supposed to feed the info back to Zen Cart. You might be able to use the Paypal button images then; I don't know if Paypal would allow this.

[Merlinpa1969]

forgive me I was joking but it is kinda weird that you want to strip out the shopping cart from a shopping cart,

rather than paypal buttons use paypal express and be done with it,

if he wants amateurish maybe suggest lots of bright colors and animated gifs...

that kind of thing,

that way he gets his look but the site actually works...

the buttons per product are dynamically created,

[Astroman]

I did start out by saying it was odd. :)

To be honest I've pretty much finished the thing and the guy says today he doesn't want all the shopping cartness, just a straight to Paypal click from each item... but he does like some of the other ZC functions, like the currency changer for instance. Plus I've already put all his products in there so I'm trying to work a way around without having to abandon ZC all together and just use a CMS or even a static site and putting single buttons in for each items, which will take days.

I was thinking I could link the currency and the amount in the paypal button form with the codes for displaying the price that is used underneath the item titles. For the Sold part I would just have to type Sold in red in the description and set the price to zero so even if they do click the paypal button it will be on 0. What do you think?

[gjh42]

If you set in admin to track stock (even if it's only one of each product), and not allow add to cart when out of stock, the functionality will be automatic. The display can be modified to show "Sold" instead of "Sold out" or whatever the exact default is for this situation.

[Astroman]

I'll have a play around with it today and see what I can do.