Magento is an awesomely powerful ecommerce platform. That said, it is also very complex, and I'd like to know if there is a relatively simple way to utilize Magento as our mISV site's backend to fulfill orders without actually "using" Magento's framework to build the site, run the site, etc. In other words, I don't want to use the built-in CMS, etc. since we have a static website already built. I'd just like our Buy Now buttons to utilize the checkout stuff, and would like to be able to use the back-end part to keep track of orders etc. I was able to accomplish this "fairly" easily with osCommerce, but Magento is proving to be a little more difficult to wrap my head around since I've only started looking at it for a few days now.

I found another person asking this same exact question on the Magento wiki (along with several others in the forum), and none of them ever receive a reply for some reason. I noticed that there are may Magento experts on Stack Overflow, so I thought I'd give it a go here. This is an example of one question asked by someone on their wiki, and it captures the essence of what I'm trying to accomplish:

Hi, as far as I understand, all shopping cart/eCommerce solutions I see are full featured PHP driven web sites. This means that all the pages the user interacts with, are server generated, and thus, the experience, is tied to the magento framework/workflow. I’d like to integrate bits and pieces of eCommerce/shopping cart in my existing website. Effectively, I’d like to have:

1) on a product information page, a “buy now/add to cart” button that adds to a cart

2) on every page, a view cart/checkout option

3) on a checkout page, with additional content already in place, having the magento “checkout” block integrated in the page (and not the entire page generated from Magento).

Have any of you done this with Magento? This is for a simple one-product website so any advice you could share would be highly appreciated.