The basics of starting online business...

Just a basic online retail biz, it'll maybe be 20-30 pages in all.

Are there any free-reliable shopping carts out there? What about free, reliable credit card merchants? Any ideas? how about the least expensive?

And to keep it on topic, what do I require from a webhost?

I know its hard to judge but how much transfer would a month if I received 400-500 customer hits?

Lotsa questions, thanks...

Stuart

Your transfer requirements would be minimal, maybe a gig or 2 per month. I'd say your best bet though, would be to get a more beefy / expensive account ( probably still under $25 / mo ) somewhere where a shopping cart such as Miva Merchant is provided free. Can't think of any hosts offhand.. but they shouldn't be hard to find.

Are there any free-reliable shopping carts out there? What about free, reliable credit card merchants?

Yeah, there are some free shopping carts. You can find them on cg.resourceindex.com or hotscripts.com. Carts like miva may be a bit technical for starters. You may be better off going with some other scripts.

No, there are no free and "reliable" credit card merchants that I know of. Merchant processing is a tough business - can't think of any reason why someone would do it for free.

With regards to hosting, I think JDF covered it. You won't need a lot of transfer or disk space for a small site.

Good Luck!