struggling to integrate oscommerce in existing website

[flounderinghopelessly]

Hi,

I created a website to keep interest 'ticking over' while a product was being developed in China for sale online. The product is now available to me and I need to generate shopping page.

I've accessed cpanel and attempted to add oscommerce but received a message that I would need to delete index.php and an image folder from my docs. Queried it with the provider's help section as I was wary of deleting the image folder given that it included all of the pictures/gifs etc. on the existing website and I didn't want to start again.

Their disinterested response was 'yeah, you have to do that.'

I believe that these files only need to be deleted if I am making the shop aspect the 'homepage.' What I actually want to do is retain the existing website structure BUT incorporate access to a shopping cart via a page within the site.

Unfortunately, whilst I think that this can be done, I cannot fathom out how. I have trawled the net etc. but cannot find an answer in simple enough terms for me to grasp. One post blithely states 'upload oscommerce' to a /shop location'

My existing site has pictures of stock on a page defined as /availability. Can I rename that as 'shop' or do I have to create a 'shop' from cpanel via RVsitebuilder?

Obviously re-configuring one page of stock etc. (only twelve items so far with pictures) is not a major undertaking but before I begin I'd like to know that I am going the right way.

Ideally I want customers to access the website via a neutral, informative home page and, if interested, access a sub page within the site whereby they can commit to purchase through a cart.

Could someone please patiently describe, in simple terms, how to do that - I'm too old for this really . . .

Any assistance very gratefully received.

[burt]

Install osCommerce in /shop/ or /catalog/ (I've sent a link to a PDF to show how to do this in easy steps. Don't do it thru your control panel.

 

Once installed, then play with it to get to grips with it and see if it is what you want.

 

Crawl before you can walk, before you start running!

[npn2531]

If your existing website is not a shopping cart, or a blog, or if you are only using a few pages on a website to present your products, then it would be far easier to incorporate your website into OSCommerce. It is a relatively simple matter to add new pages to OSCommerce, and you can add just about any functionality you can imagine to OSCommerce. If you need something on a shopping cart, there is probably a contribution available on the OSCommerce site for that.

 

To add OSCommerce to an existing site would require really solid knowledge of every aspect of OSCommerce, and it would still be really difficult, a monumental task. I have never seen it done.