Static Website - HTML FORMS Shopping Cart

large old site needs new cart

[LizaJane]

Greetings
My site is over a thousand pages selling several thousand widgets all written in static html , static html form post to a cgi shopping cart. Currently using Dansie cart. Looking for a new cart with good support and upgraded features as the original cart script has had very little support or upgrades in 8-10 years.
Do not want a data base driven cart - I would like to keep the site - pages as is with some small tweeking via say a groug find/replace of small amounts of code to match new carts needs. CGI preferred - PHP maybe?
Does such an animal exist? Any reccomendations of where to look would be helpful.
Best
Diane

[HRoth]

I was in pretty much exactly your situation and switched to Mal's ecommerce. It's $24.00/quarter. You have to add a bit of code to each page and a url. I took the opportunity while doing it to change the way I figured shipping to weight-based, which saves my customers a lot of money. It's way better than Dansie cart. Most of the support is either info online or a forum, but I have had it for a couple years now and have not had problems figuring things out on it.

[LizaJane]

HRoth - Thank you for your reply. I checked out Mal's ecommerce. Though there is documentation and forums to ask questions, I would like to find something with a bit more support. Would prefer to purchase a cart rather then a monthly fee if possible. It seems the Mal's cart resides on his server? I want it to reside on my server. I really need a solution that keeps the customer on my site throughout the order process.
Is their such an animal out there? Any other suggestions?

Best,
Diane

[RhinoFish]

i've spent the last few months searching for a non-database driven shopping cart package - my conclusion was that the ones that exist are sub-par or are hosted off your domain (or both). so i decided to do the work needed to get my existing site's data into tables so i could use a database driven shopping cart, without using their catalog builder features, just the cart / checkout.

so i import my info into their cart's backend, but leave my pages as they are, adding an add to cart link that will allow me to use the backend of their software.

my existing pages are dynamic, so it's not exactly your case - it didn't take that much work for me to create bridges between my existing underlying data to import it into the cart's database.

one nice thing about this solution for me - my catalog is screaming fast - always was - i build it - it doesn't have the overhead that today's carts have in their code. and G says speed is important to seo (and i know it's important to browsing shoppers!). also, i'm not tied into this cart for ever - my catalog could be hooked to anther cart in the same fashion as it is now, i consider that protection against cart company direction changes that i may not want to follow going forward.

given the out-of-the-box catalogs i see in action, i'd say the time is ripe for some cart group to sell a hosted solution that easily integrates into existing sites (they all claim to do that!).

[LizaJane]

Do you know of ANY cart or CMS that I can just utilze their back end that would work with my static pages + the html form post? Pointing the cart/cms to all the urls is fine with me as long as I can disallow bots to find any dynamic page it produces.
After 5 solid days of searching I'm getting desperate for a solution.
Best,
Diane

[HRoth]

Seems like I remember you can use X-Cart with static html. I know it was one I considered before I did Mal's.

[virgvv]

Have you looked at 1ShoppingCart?

[lorax]

X-cart will do an export of a live cart to static HTML but I believe you have to choose/plan for one option or the other. ShopSite does static HTML exports as well. Both use databases to hold the data but squirt it out into static HTML using template system. ShopSite is the easier to use IMHO and it's typically supported/upgraded by the host.