Redesigning a good site

[vsmart]

I've been asked to enable a shopping cart onto a site that gets good traffic and sales but has a poor overall site design (from an aesthetic viewpoint). The site was originally created by the owner of the business using frontpage so it looks rather terrible but do to good fortune, the owner used some rather good seo techniques so that his site is ranked number one for some of his products. He uses paypal and an order form to process online orders and he gets a good percentage of overseas customers.

What would be the best way (strategy) to implement the shopping cart without affecting his current number of hits (60,000 hits per month). And what would be a solid shopping cart to deploy that is around $1,000 and less. I've read that Oscommerce is pretty good as far as a free solution is concerned. I'm looking for any opinions and any pitfalls I should avoid while implementing his shopping cart. I would hate to be in a position where after enabling his shopping cart, his monthly average number of visitors dropped off due to our involvement. Thanks for your input.

[mipapage]

vsmart

I am currently hacking up OSC to get it xhtml/css valid and template driven, and have to wonder how you'd shoehorn that excellent program into an existing design. Maybe I'm not seeing something here but it's not a standalone cart - it's more of an e-commerce solution.

(I'm a rookie at e-commerce, but not web design.Take the above comments about e-comm accordingly!)

[vsmart]

I'd like to add that I'm looking for a shopping cart that is easy to customize and administer and is compatible on a linux environment.

[ectect]

Hi

Have you looked at ready made designs / templates with the cart included? A search on Google should bring up a few.

Cheers

[Essex_boy]

Could be wrong but Id use Xcart for this, I seem to recall that you can implemant their buttons onyour site without editing to much of your current code.

OS on the other hand, well im sure it could be done its just a little bit more complecated.

Sticky if you want details of someone I think may be able to assist you.

[Marcia]

One thing you'll want is search engine friendly pages. I've never used it but have heard that Americart is good for that. The open source carts, osCommerce and Interchange can be adapted for flat pages.

If he's currently using PayPal for payment, that adapts to using Mal's Ecommerce and there are a couple of shopping cart scripts that integrate with it, if he wants to stay with that as a payment solution.