Newbie questions about setting up shopping carts (etc)

I'm a newbie in setting up shopping cart, and am looking for advice so that I do it right...

Our website is fruitlady.net; selling fruit baskets and gift boxes.

I'm building a storefront (fruitlady.net/zencart/) that I think will work...
We have two categories of products (baskets and boxes), 16 baskets listed, and 6 boxes; each having multiple sizes (prices and weights) available.

In my initial setup, I made 2 categories (bakets and boxes) with products of the individual items included. Prices and shipping weights have been standardized over the categories (mostly), and I think these can be handled (size, weight price) by options within the categories? (so far, so good!)

Before I get too deep into it, is there a better way to handle our products?

The company had an account with FedEx, and uses FedEx for shipping. So activating the FedEx shipping module will be a task on the to do list. Getting realistic shipping charges depending on the shipping zone and package weight for customers buying the baskets/boxes is good to have.

We are also looking at getting a payment gateway set up to handle credit cards. The company currently has a merchant account with Bank of America for 'off-line' credit card approvals, but BOA tells us that to handle credit card processing from our web site, we would need to upgrade the service... $$$

I have found other payment gateways that work with shopping carts and also provide off-line credit card approval (iPayment) that are less expensive. But how well do they work?
iPayment has a 50% discount that we could take advantage of, through our web hosting service.

We would like to incorporate Zen Cart into our existing web site with a [Buy Now] button on product pages that adds items to the shopping cart, and does the checkout. Zen Cart's storefront is OK, but is a duplication of our existing website, and a different look...
is it feasible to add the [Buy Now] button (and other shopping cart interface) to the existing web site, and avoid using the storefront?

Anyways, do you experts have thoughts on how to get everything set up and working? I don't mind doing the dirty work of getting it up and going; I just want to do it right the first time!

Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. :)

~TomA

We would like to incorporate Zen Cart into our existing web site with a [Buy Now] button on product pages that adds items to the shopping cart, and does the checkout. Zen Cart's storefront is OK, but is a duplication of our existing website, and a different look...
is it feasible to add the [Buy Now] button (and other shopping cart interface) to the existing web site, and avoid using the storefront?

my first thought would be to do this the other way round and use zen as the complete site and incorperate your excisting one into it.
Zen is not designed to be a "backend" and you can make zen look and feel however you want it
:P

This is a bit off topic, but I would suggest you find the dot com domain and buy it and move your site to that address.

I'd agree with Donal about just using Zencart as your whole site (and with Kim about switching to .com), but if you don't want to give up your existing site, there's some info here, beginning at post #11:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=84257

Thanx stevesh, this is what I was looking for!

(I should have been able to find this on my own by browsing through topics... eventually! I'm hesitant about asking 'stupid' questions that are already asked and answered. But sometimes asking questions gets the answers quicker! ... I've worked in tech support many years, and have answered redundant questions from users many times...)

I'll look into the examples provided, and see how we can use the [Add to Cart] button/link to Zen Cart from our existing pages. I'm not averse to mucking with code to provide functionality to an existing product. Done that several times for IBM OS, DB software development, and I'm comfortable working with DHTML and SQL; and am learning syntax for PHP ... So, I don't mind adding custom code here and there as long as it fits in with the product architecture.

I may use Zen Cart strorefront as our web site eventually. For now, we want to add shopping cart and functions into our current web site, but getting it set up initially so that it is flexible for whichever direction we decide to go. "The Fruit Lady' is a family business that has been going for 30+ years; there are several younger family members that may be able to take over some of the web site work... kids and nephews always need summer jobs!

thefruitlady.com is the primary domain we use; fruitlady.net is an alternate domain that points to the same location. I use fruitlady.net for access because it's easier to remember and type. Is there an advantage to using .com instead of .net domain name for Zen Cart? AFIK, they're equivalent?

Anyways, thanx for the pointers and links. Zen Cart users are great for providing answers! :)

TomA

One thing to consider is that, unless you don't mind a jarring jump in appearance when adding to cart, you will need to style your Zen Cart template to match your current site (not that big of a job for your design). Once you have that, it's not difficult, though perhaps time-consuming, to replicate all of your current pages in Zen Cart define pages or ez-pages. You can copy & paste HTML content into those.