tie Zen Cart to another program...

I have a basic .php program that maintains customers account balance.

I would like to tie the shopping cart to my program, so that as customers finalize a payment, the ZC shopping cart deducts the dollar amount from the customer's account balance.

I have been thinking that I would open the shopping cart and have it call a file that I wrote and deduct the shopping cart dollar amount from the user's account balance ...

-- how to I pass the shopping cart dollar amount as a string to my file
-- which file do I modify to tie the shopping cart to my account deduction program?

Any ideas or tips to get me going in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I can't help with interfacing with your current system, but what's the account balance for? There's a store credit module in the Free Software Add Ons section which might let you merge your current system into Zen Cart. You'd probably only have to change the literal "store credit" to "account balance".

Edit: I can't find the module I'm thinking of :blink: but I did find http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=501 which might also be helpful.

Yeah, I tried to install it. Didn't have much luck.

Besides, from what I can tell, it doesn't have much of a range. I'm trying to figure out how to tie the confirmation page to my other mysql database.

thanks!

Using Gift Certificate would be the best way imo because it is set up as a prepaid account value.

1. If your customer data base uses the same customer ids you could link into coupon_gv_customer, coupon_gv_queue tables and populate with the dollar amount.
2. If your customer ids do not match you would have to setup a cross references table.

With this approch if the customer is short in money they would have to us the zen cart payment method to make up the differance. (Which you could change if need be)

It will deduct from the dollar amount they have on account. (Where you can allow check out or force them to load more money)