Business outgrowing home made cart

Ideas on ways to replace workings while leaving the shell

[salewit]

We starting out e-commerce site about 3 years ago. It wasn't really intended to take off, but it has. I built the site from scratch using PHP. At the time I was still learning PHP, so it's not a super robust system, and there are still some bugs mostly continuity (clicking twice on authorize, using back buttons, etc).

It would be great to simply change the entire site, but I'm worried about rankings. There are over 700 products each with 2 images. What I'm thinking would be a better approach would be to simply change the inner workings or the guts of the cart system and leave everything else (database, layout, etc).

Does this seem like the best approach? Does anyone have any recommendations on some good tutorials/code on shopping carts in PHP that are fairly full-fledged?

[lorax]

Well, the database cannot easily be separated from the code. THey go hand in hand. If you want to change to some form of off the shelf product (free or commercial) then you're most likely going to need to change the database.

[Corey Bryant]

It would take some time of course, but if you are wanting to move to another system, you would have to map the records and move them over.

This happens to a lot of people. If you really think you need a new system, get some quotes from some programmers. Depending on your needs, they might be able to just build on from your code.

osCommerce comes to mind for something that you might download and take a look at. There are a ton of PHP sites that could help you, depending on the way you learn, etc

-Corey