Is it possible to link from a showcase store to a live store?

[Abby]

Hi

I have been displaying my product range by using 5 individual showcase stores (each store has over 180,000 listings)

Between the 5 stores the actual physical inventory count is approx 40,000 part numbers - the listings are really just application listings.

Now my customers are requesting the option to actually order on line and I'm wondering if it is possible to have the showcase stores linked to a live store i.e. the customer browse the showcase store and if they want to order they click on the order button and that will bring them to the live store.

Customer details only need to be on the live store but the customers might order product from all of the showcase stores at one time.

I've tried loading the whole product range onto one store but its too much for my server and the budget doesnt stretch to an upgrade at this time

Thanks

[kobra]

40,000 items should not tax a good server
and it would be best to have a live shop versus showcase

What you desire could be custom coded - but why?

[Abby]

It might be easier to understand what I'm trying to do if i explain it more. I cant give a link to the set up because its contained in a password protected area.

At the moment I have a webpage which has links to 5 seperate showcase zen-cart installations on 5 subdomains. I wasn't really thinking about the future when i set it up so I just took the information from one of our catalogues and entered each application as a product so I have approx 180,000 products and 5,000 categories in each installation.

All of the installations work fine on their own but when i tried to load the contents of the five into one live shop, the pages take forever to load. I think the main problem is down to the number of categories i need. (as currently set up the combination of the five sites have 20,000 categories and nearly 1 million products - products can drop to 40,000 if i link them)

I dont have everything loaded yet but currently I'm getting the following with linked products.

Parse Time: 14.560 - Number of Queries: 47776 - Query Time: 10.955475640396

I dont know anything about php or coding but i was hoping to find a way of setting things up so I could continue to have the 5 seperate showcase installations as they are now but adding a link or button to each showcase product that would redirect the customer to a 6th live shopping cart which would capture all the transaction details etc.

From reading through the forum i gather that when you change from zen-cart to a normal website you can loose the session so anything added to the cart will be lost so I'm assuming that would happen if i just put a link on the product page in showcase to the corresponding actual part number listed in the live shop?