Hi all,
Just downloaded SCC and SCDesignerPro trial versions today, so I'm new to all this. I'm a website designer looking for an easy to use shopping cart *that my customers can use themselves to add/delete/revise products.* I am trying to figure out if this is possible if the site itself was built in WordPress and the Shop was just one page of the WordPress site. I wouldn't expect it to work from the WordPress admin panel, and of course with WordPress.org your files live on a hosting company's server just as if you had built a "regular" website, but am interested in finding out if there are any conflicts between CoffeeCup shopping carts and WordPress. Thanks for any info!

Hiya Holly,

You should have no difficulties since it doesn't integrate between the two at all. All it would be is links back and forth between the program. You will need to have a server to upload the shop files to though, you won't be able to install this to the wordpress site at all. You'll need to have your own server space for it, should have your own domain name so you can work without it being all pointing to wordpress.org and then after you have it all installed on your computer you setup the Home page to point to your Wordpress site page, and you setup a Menu option on your Wordpress site to point to your shop. They are basically entirely separate entities, but very doable

Thanks, JoAnn! Sounds good. I already have a domain name and hosting for the WordPress.org site so will test this out tomorrow on a test site. Now my next challenge will be to try to just get the "meat" of the shop onto the site. I don't want to have to recreate the WordPress site's banner, navbar, etc., on the shop page in the shop's template (too complex) so it would be great if I could just plunk the shop code into the center of an existing Wordpress page so that the Wordpress "shell/template" is running the thing and the shop is just embedded on one page. Have read many posts about this here on this site but am not sure it can be done. Don't want to use an iFrame, either.

Hiya Holly,

Sorry no can do, they don't integrate at all. I think you misunderstood what I meant. The Shopping Cart Creator creates basically a full site setup which is why I mentioned that all you do is link back and forth between the 2. I don't know if you can upload an entire shop setup to your wordpress site area, I believe that's just an install of a blog site that you use an admin panel to tweak and change. I don't recall there being any extra upload space for you to upload other files to, but I could be wrong.

You will need a place you can directly upload from inside the Shopping Cart Program itself (basically needing to setup an FTP upload to your server) that can hold anywhere from 100 mb to 500 mb or so depending on your amount of products and images etc.

The store system is an entirely separate entity, not code you upload or insert to another site. You will just add a Menu button to your current Wordpress site that goes to your store (basically sending people to the location of your store's index.php page which is all setup with the program). And inside the program when you setup the shop you go into the settings and tell it to use an external Home page link and set that to your Wordpress site's home page link.

But you will need a place that you have full FTP access to for using this product for sure.

Thanks again, JoAnn. I think I'm seeing the picture now. In other words, I cannot have a WordPress site that has pages like "About Us, Contact, Portfolio", etc., and have another one called "Shop" and somehow insert just the meat of the CoffeeCup shop into the shell of the Shop page (created in WordPress so the header, navigation, footer, etc., are the same as the other WordPress created pages).

If the site was NOT built in WordPress but was an HTML/CSS-built website, could I do this? I don't want to have to recreate the header and navbar and look and feel on the CoffeeCup shop itself. Even with the Pro version the editing features are too limited and I'm afraid to mess with the CSS (which was difficult to find) for fear an upgrade would wipe out my changes. I'd like to put my CoffeeCup shop in the middle of an existing page on an existing website, have the header and navbar and page be what I built myself in other software, treating the shop like something that is embedded. Is that possible in a non-WordPress site?

Thanks!

It "might" be possible to have it open in an iFrame, but I don't guarantee how secure that would be for your shoppers. What you can do though is create a Shop page on your site (wordpress) with information on it about your shop or short bits about your products or anything you want to create as a sort of landing page and put a button on that page for Shop Now or something similar that would take people directly to your shop itself. Wordpress has a pretty versatile menu system that you can do an awful lot with and I would think it wouldn't be too hard to create a menu button that goes directly to your external site even without dealing with an internal shop page at all.

That's the best you'll be able to do because the program creates an entire website system for you rather than just some code to paste somewhere. It has a huge amount of pages, files, images, etc. that need to be uploaded to exactly the right place for it to function. It's definitely not suggested to edit the files if you don't know exactly what you're doing as you may not just lose your changes but you could easily break the shop itself or jeopardize the security without realizing it. A lot has gone into the program to keep it safe for you and your customers so that's a big plus.

Unfortunately, that does mean you will need to redisign it as needed to match your current site if that's what you're trying to do and the SCD Pro would help you do this quite well. Once you get the hang of that program it's really not all that hard to do. I was able to match up a completely external HTML site to my Shop itself once I played around with the designer program a bit. Takes a bit to get used to, and I'm still learning it myself quite a bit, but it's pretty good and very completely. I haven't found anything very limiting at all once you put your mind to what you want. There are many blank slates to work from that help you get what you're after so I would say give it another go and see.

Not much else I can tell you on it, it's a whole system all by itself same as any other shopping cart would be. I don't think there are many shopping cart systems out there that you can just insert code on a site page with unless you are dealing with just a few products and using PayPal Buy Now buttons from them.

I'm afraid you will not get impressive results trying to get the CC shopping cart to display within a page very easily.

Thanks again, JoAnn and The Joker - all of this is exactly the type of information I was trying to find out. Your main Shopping Cart Creator page says, under More Cool Features: "Add your shop to an existing Website or use the custom pages feature to create a standalone site." You might want to elaborate on that so that potential customers know it isn't really the best solution to do what I'd like to do as described above, but rather, that it can be plugged into an existing site with a link/button but you'll still have to do the look-and-feel customization as you explained.

It looks like a great product. Lovely, clean and easy-to-use interface, so I hope to be able to use it as you described!

You're welcome, Holly. It really is a great product. Very easy to get a nice shopping cart online without the hassle of complexity or monthly fees of some of the others.

Not a problem Holly, I'm sure you'll find it very handy and I'm sure once you really get moving on it, you'll find it's a perfect fit no matter what type of site you have or how you integrate it. Good luck and have fun with it