Does anyone have any suggestions for a shopping cart that can be integrated with an existing static HTML site?
Well, For your paper shredder site, you can develop the store, and link it with your existing site. Let the site remain for SEO, but take customers to shop using shop buttons.
You can try Avactis Shopping Cart. But I'm not sure that it can be integrated to HTML pages. It's a PHP cart. And personally I like it for clean backend and easy use. Avactis is also very easy to integrate with existing web sites.
I have a slight frustration with most of the shopping carts that I have found. Almost all of them us tables for the page layout. Many web designers agree that using tables for layout is a very poor practice, and leads to difficult modifications. Tableless layouts are much more coder friendly and lead to easier customization. ZenCart seems to be the one that doesn't rely on tables as heavily as do many of the others. Tables do have their place, but that place does not include page layouts. Anyway, I just thought I would let readers of this thread know my frustrations.
Chaosfoo - I don't know about integrating into an existing site, but an alternative with OSCommerce is to use their STS feature. This allows you to use your static html design and integrate the OScommerce features by adding a tag in the spot you want it in your design. As far as the database you would need to install a new MySQL database with OSCommerce and then copy the existing tables into your new database. I'm not the best at that sort of thing so I couldn't give you specifics. Here's the link to the sts: http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1524/ I don't know of any feature like wordpress where you can change the theme at the click of the button, but this is the best solution I could think of for your situation.
Thanks for this information. I did not know this about OSCommerce. I will definitely be reading up on this.