Can I integrate Zen Cart into my existing site?

I have successfully installed ZenCart V1.3.8 onto my server. My current web site (www.squipusa.com) has many informational pages about my products. I like the web site like it is, but I would like to incorporate a full featured shopping cart with discounts, pricing for wholesalers, etc. So I thought Zen Cart would work well. Can I keep my existing site and only use Zen Cart for the product pages? Or do I need to scrap my existing site and figure out how to get all of that content into Zen Cart? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have spent many hours researching and I'm still not sure of the best way to proceed. Thank you.

You can just replace the product pages (everything under the main Products button) with Zen Cart pages, styled to look like your existing site. The "Order Squip Products" page could be the ZC homepage, with individual product lines as categories and the product order listing in the product listing page. You can drop all of your product information pages' content into ez-pages, and use the ez-pages TOC sidebox mod to display only the relevant ones for the current product.

THere is a risk of losing the customer's session and cart contents if they leave the Zen Cart portion of the site for more than 24 minutes; if you see this as likely, it would be safer to have ZC run the whole site to avoid losing sales.

I have a similar question. I just purchased an existing business, macabiskirt.com, that has a site that was originally written using Smarty templates but lacks a lot of functionality provided by ZenCart. For instance, there is a shopping cart of sorts but it really just emails me the customer information which I then have to key into Quickbooks and charge their card through Quickbooks.

Instead of trying to do it all myself, I'm thinking of using ODesk to hire someone to convert my existing site to ZenCart while trying to retain the basic look and flavor of my existing website. Does this approach make sense?

Thanks.

Post a request in Commercial Help Wanted to get quotes from folks familiar with Zen Cart on redesigning the site.

There's a learning curve with Zen Cart, but I think you'd benefit from familiarizing yourself with the inner workings. You can take a peek at the free templates available with Zen Cart and see if any suit your purposes. http://(sorry, site offline)/

Thanks for the advice! I will have to dig into the templates and figure out how to change them to do what I want them to do.

Some appearance related stuff is controlled by the template. The rest is controlled in the admin.

I suggest you install Zen Cart in its own folder and play around with it for a bit. If you get really stuck, there's tons of info in the Tutorials/FAQ section and the forum.

Good luck! :cool: