Shopping cart help needed

Hi guys,

I'm a bit new to this, so I hope I have this in the right section. I have a complicated order process I need to implement. The user has to answer a series of questions off a form that will determine exactly what products he's purchasing. For example, he buys 3 sq. ft. of storage, then we ask him/her if (s)he wants packaging items, packaging services, how long his reservation is for, would they like insurance, etc..

Is there a way to use zencart just for its shopping cart functionalities? I'd like to create a form that submits its results to a store subdomain of my site with zencart installed. Via some sort of parameter passing, I'd like to submit a list of products that the user has chosen that are created and managed using the zencart backend. How could I go about this?

Basically I want to create my own frontend and have zencart handle all the payment processing/shopping cart functions. Is this even doable in zencart or should I be using another software package?

Basically I want to create my own frontend and have zencart handle all the payment processing/shopping cart functions. Is this even doable in zencart or should I be using another software package?

Zen Cart is not designed to be just the backend.

it's not quite the backend though. I mean, I want the user to interact with his shopping cart and I want him to submit payment via the zencart application. I'd just like to manually handle getting the list of products he wants and then submit that list to the zencart application and have the user handle payment processing via the zencart shopping cart