shopping carts and Host Gator

[mrs whatsit]

I'm looking for hosting for a website that will be an online store for a non-profit organization that will use PayPal to accept payments. I know I could create PayPal buttons and use the PayPal shopping cart for checkout, but I'd prefer to use a shopping cart that will allow others to add and manage products.

I have some prior experience with setting up Zen Cart, and I see Host Gator supports that. The one drawback of Zen Cart for this application is that customers have to create an account before they can start adding things to a cart -- at least that was the way I remember Zen Cart working when I last used it. I'd rather have something that allows customer to shop and add to a cart without having to provide any personal information until it comes time to checkout. If an account can be automatically created from the info the customer provides for checkout, that would be ideal.

Does anyone know if there is a shopping cart supported by Host Gator that works this way?

[Pitrow]

I'm pretty sure the latest versions of zen cart don't require any info from the customer until checkout. At least the version I installed for a customer a few years ago didn't.

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by mrs whatsit

Does anyone know if there is a shopping cart supported by Host Gator that works this way?

Technically, Host Gator doesn't really "support" any shopping carts. You can install almost any of them on your account, several through cPanel's automated installer, Fantastico.

[RBX0122]

You can add items to the cart in osCommerce without including any info until checkout. I think there are also mods for osCommerce that can help with this sort of like "one click purchase" or whatever amazon.com developed.

[mrs whatsit]

Thanks to all for the replies. Gwyneth, I was using the term "support" in the sense of providing an environment with necessary infrastructure. I'm assuming this kind of support is there for Zen Cart because Host Gator lists Zen Cart on its Web Hosting page under E-Commerce Features. I wouldn't expect Host Gator to answer questions about how Zen Cart works.

But I'm delighted to get helpful responses from this peer support forum. So I'll ask another question: Given that I'm planning to set up Zen Cart to take payment via PayPal, do I need a dedicated IP and private SSL certificate? (I'm trying to keep costs low for the non-profit I'm working with, and every little bit helps.) Thanks in advance to anyone who has advice to offer about this.

[RBX0122]

No you dont need that for Paypal but it always helps. I would list it as such in the TOS on the shopping site so that people know that they are going to be redirected to Paypals site and that banking info will not be stored on your site.