Shopping cart template or 'shell'?

[salewit]

Has anyone heard of or seen any kind of a shopping cart function, script or template kind of thing where the website, database and basic page handling is handled by the end user, but the actual cart and checkout routines are handled by this script.

Hmmm I don't know whether that makes sense, but basically carts like OSCommerce are just too involved for us, and difficult to get functioning the way WE want. We want to build the pages, handle the database stuff and deal with the look and feel, but NOT have to deal with the more serious stuff like processing and checking and shopping carts.

I know it's a long-shot.

[lorax]

Great subject. I have a number of smaller clients that are in the same boat. I'd rather build static pages or write my own cart then have to deal with an OTS product. A number of reasons for this but suffice it to say, I haven't found a reliabel script that provides that backend functionality.

Oh, and there is one piece you didn't mention - the cart itself. Will the user be able to put items into a cart and not lose them if they view another page?

[salewit]

Ok I'm glad I'm not the only one! A few years ago I took OSCommerce, installed and highly modified it for a friend/client and it was quite tough to do. No not technically, but just having to modify so many aspects of the scripts. I spent months on it and it still entailed having to add outside mods to it.

I kind of envision some kind of "helper" script sort of thing like adding PayPal "Add To Cart" buttons. Then at checkout time the script takes over and deals with the data gathering and processing.

[T_Miller]

Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but Ecommerce Templates has a "generic" version of their cart system. You simply place four lines of code (ASP or PHP) into your own page design template.