Hi again, after much research, trying out a few carts i have to admit i'm getting a bit stressed over the subject. I feel like i have "normal" feature needs, yet, i'm yet to find a cart that fits?

Here are some of the key features i'm after:

1- One page checkout (no registration needed)
2- Show shipping cost + total cost, inside the shopping cart box when a product is added.
3- Use Css/xhtml and not tables, as this gives the most professional results in my opinion for making themes.
4- Have 50x50 thumbnails of each product in the "top 10 sellers" and "new in" boxes.
5- Hopefully have an active forum where help can be asked.
6- Not have to pay a ridiculous amount of money. I wouldn't mind paying a bit, but over $200/£120 is a bit silly.
7- have a reasonable amount of compatible gateways to accept credit cards.


So far i have only really ruled out oscommerce because it is completely outdated in the theme department by using tables.
I tested prestashop and it looked to be the "one" with nearly all the features i wanted + extremely good looking (all different looking too!) live websites as examples, but then i found out it doesn't support ANY gateways (except for a contribution to use authorize.net) and i find it ridiculous if not a bit embarrassing that you can't accept cards on a prestashop.

I've tested opencart a little bit but it's basket is very basic by not showing shipping costs right away and also doesn't have one-page-checkout. I looked at live websites using it aswell and to be frank, they all look exactly the same which was very off putting.

So that's where i am now! I don't feel i'm really asking for anything incredible, just basic features that i would expect from a decent e-commerce website. Any advice and recommendations will be extremely helpful, thanks in advance. I might have forgotten something else, so if i remember i'll add it.

Did you look at Magento; it is very complete although the learning curve might be a bit steep.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Yes, i did. But unfortunately, as a starting business, i can't really afford the hosting i'd need to pay in order to use magento. I've also read that it has thousands of files and customizing it is difficult as there's a mess with so many files to look at!

A shame too, because magento looks like what i need! except for those two points. There always seems to be something "critical" that forces me to look away, in every cart i've seen =[

I really do not understand the problem; magento runs on most shared-hosts (although i would not recommend to do this with heavy oversold hosts). You should be able to start from just a few dollars a month.

What makes you think you would need to pay more for the hosting as compared to the other 2 you mentioned in your post ?

Also; there is no mess with the files; it is all clearly documented; but as i said there is a learning curve; i however doubt it is steeper is adjusting a oscommerce cart to your needs. Remember that Magento is working with templates and thus can be upgraded without having to rewrite your complete shopping cart; which is the case with packages like oscommerce.

>1- One page checkout (no registration needed)
>2- Show shipping cost + total cost, inside the shopping cart box when a >product is added.

I believe you would like shipping price to be displayed to customers once they add a product to the cart. At the same time customers do not register in the store. In this case how is shipping calculated in your store? Is it some fixed fee? Or does it depend on zip code of a customer (in this case customers need to specify zip code at least to get the shipping rate). Or probably i have misunderstood the requirements, sorry.