Shopping cart interfaces?

I'm just a little bit confused about incorporating shopping carts into your site. I've looked at Cube Cart, OSCommerce, and Zen Cart, and they all have their own interface when it comes to buying anything from your site. That is, it's like you could put your whole website into Zen Cart. That would be great if I wasn't looking to design a website myself, but I'm trying to just have the shopping cart keep track of the items a person adds, then go to the ordering page when they "check out." The way it is on most sites, like Amazon.com for an example. I don't expect a step-by-step guide because I know what I'm doing with webdesign for the most part, but can anyone tell me if the problem is with the shopping cart software options I've tried and if I just need to edit some things, or is it that I should be using something else completely?

I see what you mean. It does seem like many companies that offer shopping carts wrap them in full hosted storefronts.

This may not be much help, but I noticed that PayPal lists shopping cart vendors on its Solutions page -- looks like a few of them are strictly shopping cart providers; and a few of those appear to cost in the $15-$30 a month range.
https://solutions.paypal.com/

Most carts are designed to be complete solutions. Like most software, it's designed to fit the needs of the many. The good part about open-source products like OSCommerce, Zen Cart, etc. is that you can make of them whatever you want.

It's quite possible to customize a cart so that it can be incorporated into your site instead of you conforming your site to the cart. (Besides, you don't want your site looking like a 'standard' oscommerce distribution.)

The PayPal option DMust mentioned might work for you, but I'm guessing you're still not going to get the flexibility you want. As that's a hosted solution, you may have even less design options. It seems what you really need is just the functionality of the cart, not the look/feel. Without knowing any more than that, I'd recommend you take a closer look at Zen Cart.

I know that the shopping cart that I work for has 'Quick Links' that you can place into your already designed website. Basically, they just send the data that you want directly to the shopping cart.

Below I've included a forum post with more information about Quick Links. The Quick Links might have the functionality that you are seeking. I hope this info helps!

http://www.modularmerchant.com/forum...topic.php?t=17

When we were setting up our e-commerce site we asked our bank who they were affiliated with as a credit card clearing house. Then we used that company for both hosting and the shopping cart software. Since then the clearing house has left the hosting and software business. We are now using ProStores ( www.prostores.com ) (forerly Kurant StoreSense) from ebay, hosted by serrahost ( www.serrahost.com ). You will also need a credit card clearing house (eg ABN Amro) and an SSL security certificate vendor (eg Verisign or GeoTrust). Given consumers' concerns about online security, it is important to build these things into your storefront. Best Wishes.