I'm opening up an e-commerce website; I've found a domain name that I plan to use (haven't registered it yet).
I was planning on going with a particular webhosting service, but I'm now confused as to the best choice after going through a ton of choices.
I will open a merchant account with CDG commerce. - I had planned on going with Wachovia or Sam's Club, but was swayed after reading this BB and getting into the nitty gritty of terms.
Which gateway is a good choice with CDG commerce? I'm not looking for a gold plated solution; bargain basement fully functional is my preference.
Which shopping cart is a good choice with CDG commerce? (same as above for preferences).
Which web host would you recommend and why? I have never started a website prior to this one, so I'll need a bit of technical assistance. I'm looking to be able to do most of it myself, but want to make sure that someone's available to help me with the more technical aspects of a website. I will also be looking for guidance from the web host (or someone else, if recommended here) that will be able to get traffic drawn to my website - ie, being able to get my website to show up in search engines with a decent enough ranking for customers to visit the website.

My e-commerce site will be selling electronics; I'm looking for a minimum of $25K monthly volume (I want considerably more; hoping for >$75K/mo).

I know that I'm throwing out some very general questions here and that there's more than one way to skin this cat, but I've been researching everything to death and the only thing that I have been able to nail down is having CDG handle my credit card processessing.

Thanks in advance to everyone who takes the time to respond.

After scouring CDG Commerce's website, it looks like Paradata is my cheapest gateway solution (at $9.95/mo + .05/transaction). Authorize.net is $15/mo + .10/transaction. If what I've read is correct, authorize.net can handle a larger volume of traffic. Since I don't know how my website will do, I plan on starting out with Paradata; if I encounter bottlenecks, I'll switch to authorize.net.
Paradata offers a shopping cart solution that would probably work for me in the eCommerce complete package.
So now the question remains of a web host. I'm leaning toward Lunarpages.

I am also considering hiring a web designer to help me set up the website and ensure that I rank highly among search engines.

Please give me some feedback on where you think that I need to improve my plan. Thanks in advance.