I just found this site a couple of days ago and am in need of some help. I am looking to start a ecommerce site and am very confused about all the differences I am finding with sites like godaddy, hostgator etc.
What I want is someone to host my site, have an easy site builder, shopping cart, and an easy way to accept credit card payments.
As you can tell, I don't have any experience with this and am looking for some "professional" advise. Thanks......

Dear Horses ghost,

What specific requirements would you like to have for your e-commerce need :)? Please let us know and we'll be able to help you.

How many product are you planning to have? What payment method? Are you within U.S? Most of shopping cart now offer appearance setting, which you can change the site layout, color without any knowledge of programming. It's very easy to use too.

Hi,

There are a lot of open source E-commerce solution scripts like Oscommerce, Zen Cart, Virtue Mart etc which help you to set up an online store. You can customize those to fit in your requirement.

You can use a Free Open Source solution for your Ecommerce needs. Virtuemart is one of the best ones and you need Joomla CMS to run it. Its easy to use and setup. Just type Joomla and Virtuemart on Google and you can visit there sites. Most Cpanels Hosting have a software called Fantastico where you can install Joomla with a few clicks.

All you would need is a hosting account and a Domain name to run your store.

Hope this helps.

For shopping cart, I will recommend you to have a look at Magento Commerce.
It is a very powerful open source cart where you can customize a lot of things and also compatible with most payment processors like PayPal, 2Checkout, etc.

I not sure what I exactly need, I will have about 250 products but that will hopefully be expanding in the future. I have been looking at Hawk Host because they have alot of great reviews on this site. I am a first timer at this and just need some insite on which company offers everything I might need to start a ecommerce site. Again, I want to appologize for being so dumb about this stuff, but I just need some help in how to get started. Thanks and take care....

I would recommend a shopping cart that you bought (or freeware) and not a cart that is hosted. Some hosting companies will offer you a the ability to 'install' osCommerce on your website - that's OK. The database is yours and it is easy to export any of your data. That is one of the important things - your cart, your data. Some of the hosted solutions will not allow you to export your information - so check to make sure you are able to.

You might pay a bit more for something like this, but it will save you time and money down the road if you ever want to change / move to another company. You will pay for it later if you don't look at a few options.

The more I look the more confused I get. The other day I found a site called fastcommerce.com. Has anybody used them, seems like they have some good features. Any more help would be greatly appreciated.

Anybody have any experience with fastcommerce?