Our business is booking people on tours and activities and so far I've got something that works (should anyway, haven't made the site live yet) - I just want to make sure I'm not making this harder than it needs to be because I've hit a few snags and it's taking me quite some time to do.

We used google checkout (which can still be seen on our current website, for instance here: http://www.shakatourshonolulu.com/lu...eluau.html#res) which suited our needs well. I could just display the prices with html, let a customer choose their options, etc., which would trigger javascript that did some math and just changed the prices on screen and google checkout would parse the information from the page, and I'd have a product sitting in my shopping cart with all the relevant info we need and the correct price and it all happened lickety-split. Unless I've totally overlooked it - which can happen, I get stuck on spesearch terms sometimes and end up looking for the wrong words - it doesn't appear that Zen Cart can create a product by parsing info from the page (something to add to a future upgrade?).

SO, I've pretty much had to do everything via product attributes, which works, but is turning out to be cumbersome and limited.

Take this product page for example: http://www.shakatourshonolulu.com/ze...roducts_id=203 (I haven't added any styles yet to some of the product attributes, it's just taking me so long to input option names/values/prices). The price for the product is different depending on a person's age, and changes depending on transportation and package options, and a person could book 100 seats. That's all fine and dandy, I can accomplish all of this with product attributes, but I'm having to input so many different values it's taking me forever, and more importantly has resulted in load times that are prohibitively long because of all of the attributes.

Is there a way to maybe optimize the numerous attributes so that it doesn't take so long to load? Otherwise I'll limit the number of values that load and prompt a customer to call for higher quantities.

Am I over-complicating things? Is there just an easier way to do this with zen cart?

Also, the different combination of product attributes has led the display price for some products to be $0.00. Is there a way to manually set the display prices?

Any help or insight would be most appreciated.