When a site is located at a 3rd party host, is it possible/recommended to have only the cart portion of the site run by Americommerce?

We have an existing site to which we want to add a small store. The set up docs state that carts can be added to existing sites, but I'm wondering how this works when it comes to linking to the cart from any page on our site?  How does one make cart links available site-wide when only the cart portion of the site resides on AC?

There is a way to have items added to the cart via a url paramter (add to cart button generator) (you can also set quantity in the parameter - a development we sponsored). Simply make the add to cart buttons on your content site use this paramter to cart the item in your AC catalog... probably an oversimplification of the process, but not too far away ;)

A lot of people do this, it's a great use of the product.  Murdock has it right, we've enabled even more stuff over the url too.  Plus you can optionally do a form post to the addtocart.aspx page and send it in Variants, Personalization and much more too.  This gives you all the power of the cart pages, my account, order management and admin functionality but then you can manage your front end on another platform or host.  Theres a lot of stuff you can use this for.

Additionally you can reference products in your catalog, or even add/sell products that do not even exist in your catalog (phantom items) where you just supply a price/name/etc.

Thanks very much for the responses.  I think I should have been more explicit with my question.  I'm wondering how general cart management links ("View Cart", "Account", "Check Out" etc) are handled on an external site when only the cart pages are served by AC.  The default cart links apparently reference local AC pages, so does making these links available everywhere simply require using absolute links on the rest of the site pages?

This is one example of how I am unclear as to what are the best methods of adding an AC cart to an external site.  Thanks for any advice/suggestions you can offer.

Yes you can just reference the link absolute.  Many people running external sites will run a shop.yoursite.com type of approach.  Yoursite.com is the external site, we just attach to shop. as the url.   Then across your site you can put links to shop.yoursite.com/store/myaccount.aspx or shop.yoursite.com/store/shopcart.aspx, etc.

Some even run those pages as a popup from their main store and then you can set the continue shopping button on cart to 'close window'.   Some run those pages in an iframe on their main site so it falls within a page on their existing site.  Most just go to shop.yoursite.com's pages after adding to cart though and have that site mimic the main site's theme as much as possible.

Many options.  Pick the one most correct for you.  Hope I got your question right, I apologize if I didn't. 

Thanks again for your response.  It's good to hear that there are multiple implementation methods -- I was getting concerned that we were heading down the wrong path to get our cart implemented.

We'll keep moving forward.