I have designed a site using VSD. I also designed a shopping cart site using SCC and SCD-Pro. On one page of the VSD site, I embedded the shopping cart as an iframe. I set it up with PayPal using Website Payments Standard. The problem is that a shopper can only go so far as "proceed to checkout." Once that button is clicked, only a blank page shows up. No way to proceed to PayPal.

Has anybody successfully embedded a SCC generated site into a VSD generated one?
Is the problem with SCC, VSD, or maybe even PayPal.

The page in question is at: http://whitehatbooks.com/products.html

I think this is out of the arena of the official tech support so any informal help will be greatly appreciated.

Jim Lee

James, the easy way to go about this is to just link to your shopping cart from VSD and use the home button on the shopping cart to link back to the site. You can use Designer Pro to get your shop looking like your VSD site.

Funny you should ask this James,

I have just created a new thread asking if anyone knows how to embed VSD pages into Shopping Cart Pro.

Checkout this site. This is what i was thinking of doing.

http://www.motorcycle-gadgets.com/index.php

I love this site and this is exactly how i would like to build my SC sites.

Cheers

Thanks, Paintbrush. That might be the only way to do it. I am not so sure I can make the SCC site look like the VSD site, even with SCD-Pro. They seem to use very different templates. If I could simply copy the common elements from VSD into SCC/SCD-Pro, that would be nice. I will play around with it. Any further suggestions are deeply appreciated.

Interesting site, Jason. Way more complicated than anything I know how to do. My guess is that embedding a VSD site into SCD-Pro might be easier since the native site would be SC.

James,

If you check the themes page of the site here you may find a theme match available for purchase for SCC/VSD to match the other. There are quite a few matching themes for SCC and VSD and HTML Editor so maybe that will help if it's there.

James, have you looked at the templates? See if there's a common theme (for VSD and CCSC) that would give you a consistent look across both products?
If you don't use a theme, then lay out your VSD site in such a way that it will be easy to match in CCSCD;
same backgrounds, logo, buttons, colors... Also, how much of your information can be handled by the cart – maybe most of your pages could be there and use VSD for just the main home page (intro, overview).

I've got one in the works (the shop is waiting for product photos and some other info), but it will give you an example:
http://flippleshop.coffeecup.com/

The shop isn't live yet, but you can get an idea how it all ties together. I would really try to avoid embedding either site/shop in the other. Keep it simple and avoid any coding conflicts that could occur.

Thanks Paintbrush. I think I am giving up on the embedded SCC site in a VSD created site although I really do like the look. I want to create the feeling of staying on the same page or at the same site for everything (shopping, contact, history, etc). That is to say, I would like to have the same menu buttons at the top whether the person is shopping of browsing for other infomation at the site. It may not be possible with the CC product line.

I went to your flipple site and I see what you mean. Nevertheless, hitting the "home" button seems to take one away from from one arena and into another.

Thanks everybody for addressing this issue. All your comments have been helpful and insightful. I am sure I will be back for more.

Hiya James,

I have heard of some people embedding their shops using an iFrame, but it really isn't suggested as it doesn't sound like it's a safe thing to do. Not sure, but I would check on it first.

Other than that, one thing you can do even though it will alter the menus is to do as suggested above and create your VSD site to match your Shop (or visa versa if you have SCD Pro which should give you pretty good power over the theme setups). From there the only thing you will have to put up with is the menus being limited on the Shop site itself. Truly it's a minor thing and you can actually add links to a page to the rest of your pages if you need to. The thing is, when you set this up you can setup the Home page to go to the VSD home no matter which site they are on and this allows them to flow pretty well together.

Yes it's missing some main links this way, but it's truly not as bad as it seems. Just put the Shop or Shop Home or whatever you call your shop link onto your VSD Menu, setup the Shop menu in the Shop Tools settings to go to your VSD page, and it's pretty much set to go. If you have a ton of links on your menu then yes it will look a lot different, but only missing a few to go to the shop, and still being able to go to the Home Page of your VSD site makes it pretty fluid.

Up to you of course if this is adequate for you or not, but it works pretty well for many that are doing this already. Good luck on it no matter what you choose to do.

Thanks Jo Ann,

I think I have given up on integrating the two web site creators (VSD and SCC) even with the help of SCD-Pro and all the great people on the forum. So now I am trying to get it all done in SCC. Getting close except for not being able to change the landing page from "Shop Home" (the one that has two extra static pages) to "Home" (the one with no static page options). It seems that "Shop Home" is the default index.html page. If only I could switch them easily.

I know this has drifted off topic here so I will post later on the Shopping Cart Creator forum.

Thanks again to all for taking a look at the problem and trying to help.

I am using the Film Noir SCCP template for my shop. I tried using only SCCP to make the entire site, but alas there are too many things that cannot be changed (my home page will only show up as "home" for the page title, and the description is "/") Perhaps I have something messed up somewhere but I figure that I may as well make a VSD main page and give the site a nice starting point. My question is this, WHERE on earth is the background for that template stored???? It would be great to just use that same template picture for my VSD main page so that it looks as seamless as possible going from VSD to shopping cart.

Any ideas?