Quote Originally Posted by Adalast View Post
Luckilly all of their pricing is flat rate, so what is engraved is not an issue. All products will only have one price each. I think I could get this working, if i could just figure out how to make it look right to fit into the site. Would I be able to make just the 4 pages that have to do with eCommerce with ZC and leave the things like their photo gallery and contact pages how they are? Would I be able to get the ZC pages to sit inside of the HTML site in any way? Perhaps with an <iframe>. If i can do that, I would need to remove the interface completely and just leave the individual products and their accompanying text fields without any of the navigation stuff. Somehow I feel like this should be a whole lot simpler than it is shaping up to be. Is there no way to just have ZC handle the cart portion only and accept input from other HTML pages with forms on them? That's all I really need, other than the flash output portion, which should be able to be accomplished with a PHP intermediary script that is called by the Flash application and hands the variables to the cart. I don't need an interface. I don't need any navigation, search or category functions. I just need a button that puts the information from the HTML form into the cart and lets people pay for the products. Does it really need to get all complicated or is there an easier way that I am just missing?

(Sorry if this came off as a curt, I am feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole prospect of how to get this working. It sounds like I should be able to do everything I need with ZC, but I would love it if I could clear the superfluous clutter out.)
Zencart (like all generic carts) cannot be "sliced up" and used piecemeal. There are almost a million lines of code in a comprehensive installation - all dependant in some way on each other.

And embedding into a frame is a no - no . Payment gateways will reject a pass from an iframe and you will also encounter serious session issues.

Session issues will also be a problem if you "house" zencart in a sub-directory as these are timed to expire (for very valid security reasons). Basically, this means that if I am on your site, adding products to the cart, and I get distracted into a gallery that is not an embedded component of your store... if I spend too long in that gallery, the shopping cart section of the site will expire the session and the shopping cart will evaporate.

Customers will not (in the majority of cases) attempt to re-fill the cart and will simply take their business elsewhere.

So there are a LOT of supplementary technical AND procedural considerations - issues that relate to the protocols of things like cURL-based bi-directional communication, invoking of SSL at critical junctures, session management...

You only need to really concern yourself with the details of the above suff when you start looking for techniques to embed ZC into an established site. If you do the opposite (embed the site into ZC) then the above issues are largely taken care of.