Use zen cart as cart/backend only? no catalog frontend..

[malice95]

My current website http://www.tv-armor.com is mostly static with a wordpress blog and uses a very simple third party shopping
cart from auctioninc that only allows paypal transactions. This is okay.. but we would like to switch over to an internal shopping
cart, have our own merchant account, and accept paypal/google checkout.

I love all the features of zencart but I have no need for the catalog portion.

I am just looking to have a 1 page sales page where people can click a buy button.. then have zencart act as the shopping cart, checkout, and backend system.

Basically strip the catalog portion off of zencart and bolt it on my current site as a replacement for the third party cart we are currently using.

Is this doable? Suggestions on how to accomplish this?

Thanks,
Mike

[Merlinpa1969]

a quick search would show you that zen cart is the entire cart and is not designed to be a back end checkout only

[DrByte]

I love all the features of zencart but I have no need for the catalog portion.

I am just looking to have a 1 page sales page where people can click a buy button.. then have zencart act as the shopping cart, checkout, and backend system.

Basically strip the catalog portion off of zencart

The catalog section is connected to the shopping cart section, which is in turn connected to the checkout section, which handles the shipping and payment section.

Stripping off the catalog section is pointless, as without that you can't have the shopping cart section or the payment handling section which you said you want.

Since you indicated that you have only one product, why not just do that ... have one product in your catalog, and go from there

[faerymgk]

Malice - I'm in the same boat. Please let me know if you find out anything. I only have 4 items and would like to have them in the design of my website which I have created in dreamweaver and just want to add "add to cart" buttons that lead them straight to the shopping cart. This has to be possible. ??? anyone?

[gjh42]

If you want your shopping cart to look like it belongs to your site, you will need to style its template to match your site... at which point, there is no reason to keep separate HTML pages, as they can all be handled within Zen Cart.

[afo]

Malice - I'm in the same boat. Please let me know if you find out anything. I only have 4 items and would like to have them in the design of my website which I have created in dreamweaver and just want to add "add to cart" buttons that lead them straight to the shopping cart. This has to be possible. ??? anyone?

No, Zen Cart doesn't work that way. Read the posts by Merlinpa1969, DrByte and gjh42 in this thread. You are much better off styling Zen Cart to match your current site and using all of Zen Cart's functionality.

[malice95]

Thank You for the responses all..

So can it be themed and setup so it is not the home
page of the site? aka the homepage of zencart would
be shop.php for example..

Could the catalog portion be themed so it is just one page basically?

Thanks,
Mike

[afo]

You can install Zen Cart in its own folder and link it to your existing site, but if your customer moves from the Zen Cart portion back to the existing site, items in his/her shopping cart may be lost.

The best way to use Zen Cart is to recreate the look of your site in Zen Cart and allow Zen Cart to run the entire site.

The "theme" is the look of the site, not how it operates. You're mixing concepts in your question.

[malice95]

Thanks AFO..

So the session is maintained in the URL, passing hidden parameters, or by cookie?

Making zencart the entire site will be difficult since I have a pretty active wordpress blog built into the site already.

Mike

[malice95]

Never mind... figured it out.. looks like zencart uses a PHP session and since my entire site is already php.. it should be
pretty easy to maintain the session throughout it.

Thanks,
Mike