Good afternoon from 19 degrees C hot & sunney wetherby Uk 
I’m on the look out for a small business eCommerce solution that fulfills the following criteria:
Shopify has been the only eComm solution Ive been recommended but having looked at their site examples they all look like glossy brochures and I cant see any structured mark up.
Any insights welcome 
Hello from freezing cold Melbourne. 
Shopify is pretty good, and you can write your own code for it if you want. However, there are other options. With Shopify, your whole site is hosted by them. You can, instead, host your own website, and just add buttons to your site for payment—at which point the user is taken to another payment site. A basic example is PayPal, but with a better solution, like FoxyCart, you can code and style the payment pages to look like your own pages, so that the user is unaware that they are on another site. That’s my preferred solution.
Of course, another option again is to host shopping cart software on your own site—such as osCommerce, Magento and the like—but this does involve a lot more expertise and there are lots of security issues that you are them responsible for … and which you should not shoulder unless you really know what you are doing.
to actually make it a step further, and a cheaper alternative is to use oscommerce, as it is open source it certainly adds to the benefits…worth giving it a go indeed…also good for SEO, no complaints so far - thats for sure…
wordpress? you have so many great ecommerce themes at themeforest.net, it’s seo-friendly and google loves wordpress (much more than 50% of custom ecommerce sites)
I’ve heard things about OsCommerce as well. being open source, you really have the freedom of making it your own and tailoring to your specific business needs.
Best of luck.
hey David, SEOMOZ posted a really good source for an SEO-supportive eCommerce solution.
I can’t find the post, but it’s somewhere in their blog either form July or June.
There are literally dozens of carts that will serve the basic needs presented here. I would like to point out that, contrary to some other opinions expressed here, I would strongly consider a hosted solution. First of all, it shifts a majority of the PCI compliance burden onto them and secondly, they have to keep their software constantly up to date to avoid security risks. When you host things yourself, the entire security and PCI burden shifts to you and you also will be responsible for ensuring that you have the latest security patches (if any are even provided).
I have yet to purchase any e commerce software that wasn’t totally useless a year later - even with the patches. By then, all of these companies have moved onto bigger, better releases. There’s nothing like moving from cart to cart every year, always playing catch-up.
Since you are in the U.K., I’d probably go with Core Commerce as my cart. Unless you are selling only to North America and not the U.K. In that case, I’d pick Big Commerce. Both of those carts have tons of functionality (including mobile commerce) fully customizable SEO friendly URL’s and, of course, all the meta title, description and header tag functionality anyone could ever want (don’t they all have that now?).
You could possibly take a look at PrestaShop, ZeusCart, and ZenCart which are open source and can be used for handling simple eCommerce solutions. Since the themes are quite simple they support SEO.
OK, since Zygoma has found a solution he is happy with, we should probably move on.