[OliverB]

Hi,

My main tool is Dreamweaver and I was wondering if anyone can suggest a way of adding a shopping cart or any stand alone shopping cart programs?

I've got access to Zen Cart, os Commerce, Cube cart and agora shopping cart...although I've not looked at or used them yet.

[Pete]

Hi Oliver,

Your simplest option would be to create a website in Dreamweaver and have the shopping cart as a separate area of the site, linked in via the menu. e.g. domainname.com/shop (or shop.domainname.com). You can skin it to look like the rest of your website, re-using your CSS in the same way as you'd edit a Wordpress or Texpattern skin.

Shopping cart wise, it depends on your needs. I'd recommend Magento as it's probably the most SEO friendly system out there. Zencart's also a safe bet as it's pretty easy to style and there's a big community behind it, which is important if you're using free software.

Don't try to do anything too complex as there are a lot of factors involved in an e-commerce site. Payment gateways and stock management systems can be a real pain to code from scratch.

Hope this helps.

[IS-James]

Something to bear in mind if you are going to use Magento is that it doesn't run well on a shared hosting platform. You really need at least a VPS with 128mb-256mb RAM to run it happily as it is very memory intensive.

[OliverB]

Originally Posted by Pete

Hi Oliver,

Your simplest option would be to create a website in Dreamweaver and have the shopping cart as a separate area of the site, linked in via the menu. e.g. domainname.com/shop (or shop.domainname.com). You can skin it to look like the rest of your website, re-using your CSS in the same way as you'd edit a Wordpress or Texpattern skin.

Shopping cart wise, it depends on your needs. I'd recommend Magento as it's probably the most SEO friendly system out there. Zencart's also a safe bet as it's pretty easy to style and there's a big community behind it, which is important if you're using free software.

Don't try to do anything too complex as there are a lot of factors involved in an e-commerce site. Payment gateways and stock management systems can be a real pain to code from scratch.

Hope this helps.

Hi

I've gone for Zen Cart, I'm only practicing at the moment. But do you know how to skin it so it looks like the rest of my site and I presume that I can download other Zen Cart templates if the whole site is built with Zen Cart?

Thanks

[Boss Hog]

You may find a lot of answers to your questions here, take a peek....

Zen Cart(tm) Tutorials and FAQs - Template Customization/ Building Overrides

Hope that helps.

[randomwebdesign]

id recommend magento too, really easy and very very professional. think you need php5 for the new version tho, dont think it works on php 4

[kithappens]

We typically use either Oscommerce or Zen Cart, you can install and use their standard out of the box templates, but to be honest it's very easy to spot when someone has done this and in my view it doesn't look very professional, we tend to customise with our own graphics, but it is a bit more technical to do this.