Integration with Existing Website

[surfing-mtber]

Can you help please. This will be my first attempt at a shopping cart having built many websites. I use Dreamweaver 8 and have built an outer site (on a temp url)
http://82.110.105.85/screwpegs.com/index.html
I have several questions:
First, can I integrate this website with the shopping cart or does the whole site have to be built from Zencart?
If I can utilise these pages, how do I link the 'pay now' and 'view basket' links and also how would link the 'Add to basket' buttons on the following page to the checkout pages? http://82.110.105.85/screwpegs.com/p...-overview.html
Sorry if these questions sound a little basic.

[Pronetiq]

Hi Surfing,

Did you ever get any response to your post? I also have a customer site built with Dreamweaver where the customer wants to add on-line shopping. I would like to add Zencart to the existing site without having to completely rework what's already there.

My first thought is to simply add a new main menu item ("Shopping") in my existing site, linking to the Zencart index.php which resides in a folder on the same server. I would then customize Zencart to make it stylistically similar to the main site, plus add links back to the main site so that the whole thing looks unified.

"Whole site" philosophy notwithstanding, isn't this a perfectly valid way of accomplishing my goal? Are there any examples of such sites?

Stephen

[Kim]

A- it has only been a couple of hours since the initial post.

B- a search of the forum would tell you that NO Zen Cart is not an "add buy now buttons application". Zen Cart is a full e-commerce SITE solution.

C- you can however completely change the look of the shop to match your visual design.

See the tutorials/FAQs for details on creating your custom template overrides.

[gjh42]

Some people do install Zen Cart in a subfolder, having a "store" inside their main site.
This has the drawback of non-logged-in customers losing cart contents if they leave the store section for the main section, at least for any length of time. You can style Zen Cart to look exactly like the original site design. Of course, once you have done that, there is not so much impediment to recreating the rest of your site contents in Zen Cart...

[Pronetiq]

Thanks gjh42, that was the gist of my post. I have no intention of trying to pull apart Zen to embed bits and pieces of it within my own site; I was simply asking whether I could run essentially two websites - an html front end and a ZenCart-based store - which link back and forth to each other.

In browsing the 'showcase' section this morning, I found www.dinetothrive.com, which seems to demonstrate what I was talking about. The front end of their site lies outside the Zen framework. When you want to actually browse and purchase the products, there are links to the Zen index.php.

I still need to investigate a full custom Zen solution, but it's nice to know that there is a hybrid option available. Thanks,

Stephen

[danceswiththewolf]

Hello!
I'm new to Zen cart so these suggestions are based on my last few years using other web shops, same problems though.
I've found the best option as far as keeping the shop and web site neat was to keep the main site intact and under the main domain ie www.yoursite.com, and set up the shop under a subdomain, ie www.shop.yoursite.com
Then style the shop as much as possible like the main site and have the link open a new window, to keep the main site open while the shopper is in the shop.
That said, if you look at my own domain you will see that for the moment I am not doing this! But it is only temp so that I can set up zencart backstage and it will end up that way again hopefully before the end of next month. The big plus is for search engines, as the shop subdomain seems to credit the main site in google.
I made it to first in Yahoo and 1st page in google worldwide for my main search term with very little work. I keep all the sites I run on 1 ISP host with mysql and back up on my own server. I don't have any problems with all the domains pointing to the various sub directories although the main site is in the root directory.

Cheers

Kenny

[bknysh]

Hi,

I'd like to dig deeper into "Integration with an Existing Website". I have an existing web site with several thousand pages and about 700,000 visitors/month. I'd like to add a store to sell premium content and charge users a subscription to access the premium content. The premium content will be multiple programs sold in a "software as a service" model. It is not practical to recreate any of the existing content within Zen Cart. I'd simply like to use Zen Cart as the store to sell subscriptions for users access individual programs in the premium content area. I expect to have many products for sale in the store, but each will be a subscription to access that particular software online. Is this possible with Zen Cart?

I see two issues so far:

1) How can I use the same login mechanism for both my premium content area and the zen cart store?

2) How can I use zen cart database information about product purchases (ie. subscriptions) to control user access and authentication within my premium content?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Bryan

[urbanx]

take a look here:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42105

once i wrapped my head around what the mod actually does, it was ridiculously simple to set up.

d.