Hi, I'm setting up a zencart on dial-up and it works fine, a touch sluggish but not annoying to me anyway, the PHP is quite quick. 100 items would be fine. It has a great tech support bbs. It's quite a bit to wrap your head around at first, but that's mainly because it does so much it takes a while to learn it all. Yes, very easy to set up your website on your hard drive, and when you have it ready upload it to your webhost via ftp. It uses a template override system which makes it easy to do this, you can make many changes and not wreck the website. If something goes wrong just reload your backup files. I do all my testing on the hard drive, and when ready, just upload a couple of files and it updates the website. You need a bit of knowledge of apache, php and mysql to do this, but I just read a couple of beginner books and got going pretty quick. Don't know anything about shopcart to compare.
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