Can I have multiple stores share one checkout?

I have made lots of carts in the past but his this is driving me mad

the guy im working for wats one domain call it securessl.com to contain the secure "parts" for all the shops.

so he wants 10 shops that all link to this server to perfom the ssl transactions (for offline cc processing). Now i didnt think this was possible but this is the way he wants it.

1. my ideas i have tried 2 sites linking to one db (but i cant get it to pass back to the http shop after the transactions)

2. an iframe on the proper domain with the shop inside on the different domain (but then no navigation buttons)

Please can someone tell me they have done this sucessfully!

Regards Mike

First thing I'd do is ask why? Is he being cheap and trying to save on the cost of SSL certs. If so, this might be a false economy as they're not that expensive, he will probably lose some sales from people who are happy to shop at joeys-store.com, but get spooked when they unexpectedly find themselves routed to securessl.com, and there will be an overhead cost to setting up and arranging this.

If it really is needed then I'd probably try doing it by tweaking the configure.php files so that each of the 10 stores has it's own domain for non-SSL pages and the secure domain for SSL pages, but also writes the non-secure domain to a session variable.

On the secure site I would amend the configure files to get the non-SSL domain from the session variable rather than hardcoding a value. That should return the visitor to the original site.

There may be a glitch in that suggestion, in that I'm not sure if sessions have been started at the point when the configure files are loaded. If not, you would need to amend the zen_href_link function (in includes/functions/html_ouput.php and equivalent for Admin) to read the session variable in place of DIR_WS_CATALOG in the secure store.

All untested I'm afraid, with no guarantees that there won't be problems that I haven't thought of.

cheers for your help i gathered as much ill just tell him hes being tight and needs a cert for each site. I have made a lot of shops but am not going to spend hours playing around wih the sessions to try and fix this. If anyone else can thnk of a dfferent way plese let me know if not ill make him do it properly

I believe that it's possible to buy SSL certs that cover a server rather than an individual domain. This might be more cost effective than buying an SSL for each store.

I have the same type of question for a different reason. I have a domain that uses Zen Cart. I am creating subdomains that I want to have seperate carts for to help clean up my site. I want my customers to be able to create one login id and be able to use it with each of my carts. When they log in or out, they should be in or out of all the carts.

Also, I want them to be able to put items from each sub domain in a single cart so they can view all items and pay for them at one time.

Is there a way to link the login and the customers cart to be accessed and viewable from all sub domains while keeping the administration and inventory areas separate?

are you planing on using different products for each "store" or are they going to be the same. If they are the same then just use one databse that they all work on

They are going to be different groups of products.