Zen cart, Store front or shopping cart?

I don't need zc as a store front. All I want to do is put some buttons on my existing pages to take my customers to the shopping cart. How does that work?

you mean like "buy now"buttons? if so doesn't work that way, you can't pass the info to the cart.

oxy, don't you love it when someone says you 'cant'?

of course you can! ...doesn't matter what you're trying to hook into zc (unless you're trying to hook in a washed out salty dog sailor) - you can use one of the php session variables, like $_COOKIE[] to pass data to zc. you can also set a database value and retrieve it later, using php mysql functions...

google> php setcookie

dont get started with zencart unless you need to. the learning curve is steep and there may be no need for it. there are multiple ways to do what you want, paypal being one. create a free, encrypted button in paypal and put it wherever you want. life will continue to exist for you, which is more than I have had with zen cart.
I'm not trashing zen-cart, it's just that any prog this deep takes a good deal of time to grasp the basics.

You should be able to point to your Zen Cart from other parts of your site, but using it as a back end only will take lots of work and probably isn't worth the effort. You're better off letting Zen Cart do the work. Reinventing the wheel isn't necessary.

Unfortunately, lots of people get bogged down with details they don't really need to mess with and miss how simple Zen Cart is to set up and use. The learning curve is steep, but not impossibly so and once you get past it, you won't understand why you thought it was so difficult.

Why don't you email them and ask them what they're using?