General question about Zen Cart

We gave our store all built already - custom designed by the client. All we need is a standalone shopping cart that I can send HIDDEN attributes for price and description. Is there anyway to use Zen Cart just as a shopping cart without entering all the product information in the Zen Cart admin screen. The site we have already has an admin area where that is all kept. So the client would have to maintain both which would be a huge hassle. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

We don't want a storefront - we just want a standalone shopping cart. I have looked adnauseum at the list of software that supports his payment gateway (Sage) and every single one is a storefront :-(.

Sadly, no... Zencart cannot be used as an "engine". Zencart is designed to be the whole website. I do not think any of the popular e-commerce packages will facilitate this.

Are you using a database for the current site? if so, what database, and how is it configured?

Yes I have the site built around a MySQL database. It is a self maintanence site where the client can maintain all aspects of the site. I guess in a sense it is a custom storefront without the shopping cart.

Thanks for the reply!

Is there any specific reason why you would not want to rather build the site around an existing e-commerce package?

The only real option to you is to code the engine yourselves - and that can take a while... (There are several hundred-thousand lines of code in zencart, for example, across nearly 1000 different files...)

If you provide a URL to the site, we may be able to see how easy it could be to Skin zencart.

Well my client is a designer and had a specific design in mind. It is much easier for me to just code it then try to customize an existing storefront within php templates. But I understand that I wouldn't be in the situation I'm in now!!

The URL is:

www DOT
ape snort (all one word) DOT
com

I don't see anything about that design that would be any problem to translate into a Zen Cart template

My personal opinion is that it would be easier to fold this design into zencart than it would be to create a cart that is as sophisticated as zencart's.

Others have created flash headers/menus so this is possible.

You have a different header for your product info pages (also possible in zencart with page-specific stylesheets and header.php files).

You have a right-column menu - very easy to replicate in zencart.

Again, this right column "disappears" for your product info page. This is so easy to replicate in zencart (takes 10 seconds with a single line of code to one file).

So yes.. my quick assessment is that it would be relatively easy to fold this into zencart.