There is a lot that goes into building an ecommerce site - I would not try and do it yourself. I would get a ready made solution. Personally, I like BigCommerce as it takes care of most of what you need for you (including the hosting). You can also become a partner and get a referral fee from them. Another option is Shopify.
There are hosted carts to consider, but that will require some more technical skill from you. Magento is one of the most famous, but it is difficult to use. OpenCart is supposed to be very well-coded, but some people have complained about their customer support. I think CS-Cart is also suppose to be good.
I found 1&1 eShops (http://order.1and1.com) You can upload onto their templates or if you want to customize they have an app that plugs into Dreamweaver. The hosting is very reasonable and the owner doesn’t kill big mammals. I notice they are an advertiser on sitepoint. They are very easy to talk to. I’ll be using them for my ecommerce clients.
Free carts are fine for some but I want someone I can call for help rather than waiting 2-5 days for the forum to get back to me.
I agree that you should probably consider using an open source solution like Magento or Spree Commerce or a hosted provider like Magento Go, Goodsie, Shopify or Big Cartel. They are all reasonably priced, have a lot of features, are easy to use and can create very nice sites.
Choosing the right shopping cart will affect how you do business in the future and will determine your ability to grow. You don’t want to spend a lot of time setting up (or building) a shopping cart and then realize 2 years from now that it is obsolete and you can’t improve it, which would then lead to having to switch carts and that’s a big investment of time and money once again.
I suggest you use shopping carts of php+mysql because those are main stream ones and there are a lot of tutorials such as magento,zencart and oscommerce are all the best choices.
I would advice you to go with magento, it is the leading e-commerce software today that provides you feature-rich eCommerce platform which offer merchants complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online channel.
I setup web shops with prestashop, I started with 0 knowledge about it, but after some time It’s easy for me. Of course, to make your own web shop system is very big job, better use free solutions
I’m a novice freelance web designer and my first client has asked me to create and ecommerce site for her. I can create websites but I’m unsure about the process behind an ecommerce site. I’ve been reading on this forum that you need ecommerce software but is there any other way. What I mean is am I able to create the whole site myself if I’m able to teach myself php and mysql which I’ve started doing or will I need some kind of software for the site?
Thanks, any help would be appreciated
If you are looking to impress your client quickly then I would say you can’t go much wrong with a hosted shopping cart like
BigCommerce - http://www.bigcommerce.com/. Comes with plenty of templates to choose from as well.
You could signup as a reseller/partner as well - http://www.bigcommerce.com/partners/
Tip: Type related:bigcommerce.com into google to find other similar vendors/providers.