I need a cart, not a site builder. Any suggestions?

[Hermitian]

I need a shopping cart that can be placed in my bin directory and called from HTML forms. I'd prefer it rely on MySQL services for synchronization since maintaining a 24/7 process on my host site is troublesome.

If ZC can provide this or you're aware of another project/company that does I'd love to hear about it. I'm not interested in custom solutions or opinions about this approach.

Thanks in advance

[swguy]

Foxycart does it like this. I tried it a long while back and it worked pretty well, and I'm sure it's way better now.

[swguy]

As an aside, I really wish one could ask questions like this on the StackExchange sites. Unfortunately if you do it gets closed in about 3 seconds.

You could dig through StackShare community edition and maybe get some ideas.

[Hermitian]

Foxycart does it like this.

No they don't, and they never did.

[mc12345678]

May i ask what you mean by being called from html forms?

This cart presents html as assembled in association with the intended page to be displayed. Each page may have some type of form to accept user input with that input driving to a next action/page. Yes all of those pages basically could be scrapped, though doing so would greatly approach one of the non-starters of the OP by needing custom coding. That is further why I asked about the meaning of an html form because that naively sounds like custom coding would be undesirably involved.

[Hermitian]

This cart

Which cart?

sounds like custom coding would be undesirably involved.

No, I would write all the HTML from scratch and use keywords specified by the cart executable to carry out actions. Twenty-five years ago such packages were common.

[mc12345678]

Which cart?

Zen Cart. Sorry for not being clear.

No, I would write all the HTML from scratch and use keywords specified by the cart executable to carry out actions. Twenty-five years ago such packages were common.

Zen Cart uses a template override system allowing you to develop/implenent as much or as little of an out-of-the-box template per page as desired.

There are those in this forum that have taken the core personal code and built a template around it and those that have done the reverse of taking a default template and modified it to suit. Your path to your desired result is yours to choose.

Have questions or seek solutions to an issue with operation or implementation then the most helpful assistance can be obtained by answering or addressing as many of the posting tips as possible in the initial post. Generally those posting are offering their assistance to see you do the best you can to be productive, this may include questions about why a specific choice has been made. Continued politeness sustains a positive environment.

Note that the provided templates generally implement the full capability of the store. There are obviously different ways to present desired information, there are some features that are available but are not implemented for the masses, and everywhere between.

Idea is, if you want to design the look of your cart around a core program then yes, Zen Cart supports that.

[Hermitian]

"I need a shopping cart that can be placed in my bin directory and called from HTML forms."

Idea is, if you want to design the look of your cart around a core program then yes, Zen Cart supports that.

What is the name of this executable, what language is it written in, and where can I learn the calling interface?

[barco57]

what you are describing is a headless ecommerce application where there is no front end view layer shipped with the application. You have to build out the front end yourself and communicate with the backend cms (database via an API layer). Zen Cart is not this... ZC front and back end are fairly coupled together and ZC doesn't have an API you can talk to currently.

[Hermitian]

ZC doesn't have an API you can talk to currently.

Thank you for the answer!