Very New and frustrated - Please Help

Hello guys and girls. I am attempting to create my first e-commerce site. I have created the entire site already in Dreamweaver, the site is made using CSS. So far everything has gone great until the addition of a shopping cart! :(. Zen cart was reccommended to me by quite a few people. I have successfully installed it on my site but i am now very lost. I can access the admind area, the main page etc. However, from the looks of things, i cant just have an "add to cart" button on my site that i had already designed and uploaded- that leads to a shopping cart? It seems like zencart is a whole site design utility complete with templetes etc. Am i wrong on this?

Currently i have my website, designed with XHTML and CSS, it is fully functional and is uploaded ot my webserver. i simply need to integrate a shopping cart into my site. Is this possible with Zencart? if so could someone please walk me thru this? or am i needing a simpler shopping cart solution? My apologies for not grasping all this, but so far i cant even create or find the code for an "add to cart" button in zencart ;(. i thought i'd get some sort of html link that i could plug into Dreamweaver and that would add buttons for ADD TO CART, CHECKOUT etc. It's all a bit overwhelming. Please help.

Thanks for reading this,
CHadd

Hi Chadd, welcome to the Forum. :smile:

Zen Cart, like most dynamic scripts, will not work from pages created in an HTML Editor. One must work with the script files and usually, a Web page is made up from more than one file.

There is a Module called easyEmbed that allows one to incorporate Zen Cart into a current site; you would need to Search the Forum for the Support thread. Does make things easier but one must know about working with PHP files. If you find things too difficult, as some do, then you might want to post in the Commercial Section of the Forum and hire someone to help get you started.

It depends on what you're selling, and to whom.

Zencart is a complete shopping cart, and doesn't work well as a backend cart from an existing website. There are plenty of such cart scripts out there, so if you have a small number of items, and use PayPal or Google Checkout only, you probably don't need to take the time to learn Zencart.

On the other hand, if you plan to get serious about ecommerce, with plenty of products in multiple categories, and various shipping and payment options, you can't really do better than Zencart. You'll need to set aside Dreamweaver, get yourself a good FTP client and text editor, and settle in for a lot of reading in the tutorials and this forum.

Couldn't have put it better myself, stevesh.

Zen Cart is a total package, not a backend cart. I took the Holzheimer site in my sig from a site which required the user to mail the order to the owner to an HTML site with PayPal add to cart functionality to Zen Cart. Zen Cart is by far the easiest to maintain.

Hello there...

I had a site built and was using Paypal buy now buttons initially but my products and variations - such as quantity discounts, payment options other than Paypal, check / money orders, etc. became a huge headache.

I needed a cart - and all the automatic features like welcome emails, account creation, order tracking, inventory control, and all the other cool things zen cart is really good at doing.

Since I already had time invested in the site design, content, SEO - etc, I created a store and installed it in the mysite.com/catalog folder. I styled the store to match the feel of my existing website for a transition that was natural. I also did the same with my Paypal processing header - to match the site.

It is easy to link from content in your website - to specific areas of your store - and this is what I was able to achieve.

All you do with this is tell the link or button or menu within your website - to point to the specific store product or category. Simply navigate to the store item and copy it's corresponding url. Go back to the website content and paste it inside the button navigation.

The button might look something like this:

and obviously point to the area of interest...

http://easyskratch.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=65

I found the ez-pages somewhat restrictive.

This may or may not be a solution for your problem.

Feel free to PM or email if you want some more details.

Hope this helps.

Easy...:smile:

thanks for the outpour of help guys and gals. i am at work now but will try some of the suggestions later when i am home. from the research i did it seems like zencart will be my best option, and i will try to link my main pages from or to zencart like someone sggested. can someone please give me a simple walkthru to adding the "add to shoppingcart" page on my page? has anyone bougt the zencart book featured on this site? if so doest it offer step by step instructions and does it cover a lot of the things i am asking here?

One caveat - I believe that ezscratch was talking about linking to product info pages in Zencart from your external pages.

Adding a product to the Zencart shopping cart from outside Zencart is a different matter altogether, as far as I know, and you'll run afoul of Zencart's sessions stuff that way.

Ok so with my limited expertise how hard will it be for me to customize Zencart to look like my webpage that i have designed? it was made with Xhtml and CSS. also how do i go about removing all the stuff i DONT need from zencart? i find the defualt template cery busy and it has a lot of categories that i wont use. i can post a prelim version of my website here. I think my other option might be to hire a coder to code in php to make zencart look like my website that i had built?

Dunno.

Can we see your current site? You don't want to pay someone if it wouldn't be that difficult to customize Zencart. The base Zencart install has a lot of stuff that many of us don't use, and that can be turned off fairly easily.

Some things can be turned off in the admin.

The template is customizable and can be made to look like your current site, but you are probably better off scraping the current site and customizing Zen Cart to handle everything.

afo:

Some things can be turned off in the admin.

The template is customizable and can be made to look like your current site, but you are probably better off scraping the current site and customizing Zen Cart to handle everything.

Thanks Affo! How do i turn off most of the headings and trim down the side panels? i would also like to add a custom background. it seems so sad to scrap my original site since i put about 2 months into making it :(. if i post it on here could any of you guys help me with making zencart look like my site?

If you could give me a step by step as to how yo ugot rid of some of the stuff on the deafuly zencart page and got your buttons to load i'd love that. Right now i have a lot of pages that were created with XHTML and CSS. i can edit html and css files, i am not familiar with php. Maybe a breif step by step on how to load a single page with a single button or such, would be helpful. i am gonna try and get bits of info from everyone then try to rebuild my site in Zencart. hopefully i can get it to look like my origianl page.

ezskratch:

Hello there...

I had a site built and was using Paypal buy now buttons initially but my products and variations - such as quantity discounts, payment options other than Paypal, check / money orders, etc. became a huge headache.

I needed a cart - and all the automatic features like welcome emails, account creation, order tracking, inventory control, and all the other cool things zen cart is really good at doing.

Since I already had time invested in the site design, content, SEO - etc, I created a store and installed it in the mysite.com/catalog folder. I styled the store to match the feel of my existing website for a transition that was natural. I also did the same with my Paypal processing header - to match the site.

It is easy to link from content in your website - to specific areas of your store - and this is what I was able to achieve.

All you do with this is tell the link or button or menu within your website - to point to the specific store product or category. Simply navigate to the store item and copy it's corresponding url. Go back to the website content and paste it inside the button navigation.

The button might look something like this:

and obviously point to the area of interest...

http://easyskratch.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=65

I found the ez-pages somewhat restrictive.

This may or may not be a solution for your problem.

Feel free to PM or email if you want some more details.

Hope this helps.

Easy...:smile: