Not sure if CS-Cart can do what I'm looking for? I'm also no sure how to explain my situation. Well, basically, a client of mine was looking into male enhancement products (** if you'd care to know **) and having me design a website to promote and sell their products. They like a lot of the layouts they've seen on other sites but most don't feel like shopping carts. They pointed to [url=“VitaliKoR – VitaliKOR is a natural male enhancement supplement manufactured in a GMP certified facility. - Ready When You Are - VitaliKoR - VitaliKoR - VitaliKOR is a natural male enhancement supplement manufactured in a GMP certified facility.”]http://tinyurl.com/76777wx[/url] as an example.
[font=“Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”][size=“2”][color=“#000000”]NOTE: The link doesn't really have anything age restricted material – if pretty tame. [/color][/size][/font]
Basically the layout is fun and colorful but my client is correct, it isn't a shopping cart. It's just a regular website. BUT when you go to buy a product and click ORDER NOW, it takes you to shop.theirsite.com, meaning they host shopping cart software on their server. The cart from what I can tell is magento which I personally feel is overpriced and overrated. Still, that's it, a link that sends you to the checkout page. Above it has a bit of customization meaning I can see their header from the main site with tabs (although not active) and their logo, etc, but it's a different site, a different cart.
Can you achieve something like this with CS-Cart, where I can somehow link an item or link something that immediately pushes people to the CS-Cart checkout page? I know the CSCart page would most likely look and feel like a CSCART template and not my site, unless I did major customization, but it would be a start.
I really like CS-Cart and I use it for several sites that I have created for clients, but I think magento may have something here that is worth considering.
Well, I figured out the affiliate program with Cs-Cart. When I create a product banner, it displays the product and when I click it, it sends them to the shopping cart of my site with the item in their cart. Perfect! I tried to create a graphic banner but when you click that, it takes them to the product page. Is there anyway to make it so that a graphic banners adds an item to a cart when clicked.
Oh well, this is close to what I need. On second thought,I like how these carts take people to the actual checkout where they enter billing and shipping details, payment info, etc. I also realize that a few of these companies use zencart and it's been entirely altered.
Easy enough to do a custom category listing page to display the single (or different packages of a) product, then to have a “Buy Now” graphic that simply takes them to the checkout page. You can easily disable all the sidebars or other extras that you don't want to display. You simply have a block in the main content for the home page that is a category listing (selecting manually) and where you have your custom 'block' as the category listing page.
I have clients who sell various “supplements” that market their products in this way. Most are single product with 30, 60 and 90 day supply packaging, but one or two are setup to act as separate domains that essentially share the same customer and order data between the product offerings.
Once you start doing real multi-language stores, you have to develop your own naming conventions for things like images since images are not language dependent in current cs-cart.
If you want to host your information on something like wordpress and then just have a link to add the product to the cart and take them to checkout, there are free controllers listed on this site. You can probably search for “remote_checkout” or go to this link for details on how it's done: Adding Product To Cart Remotely - Hints & Modifications - CS-Cart Community Forums