Discussion:.There are nearly limitless choices for eCommerce solutions, both open source and proprietary; so I won't profess to be an expert in the full domain of electronic commerce alternatives. But with that being said, as a starting point there's little doubt that two of the more financially productive facets of the modern web clearly include Internet Advertising and Electronic Commerce. In view of this, it's little wonder that I was recently called upon to design and implement an online shopping website for a client. As you would expect, there are some very useful reviews of pertinent software, both proprietary and open source, to be found with a simple Google or Bing search. Consequently, there's little point in my paraphrasing them here. The following are some personal observations instead.
This client requirement represented the second eCommerce website study I've undertaken, and I've discovered in these processes that one of the most important capabilities to investigate thoroughly is the capacity of packaged software to accomodate the variations of size, color, style, model year, finish, etc ad nauseum of the items which might be sold as variants of a particular SKU on the site. This reflects a pivotal issue which defines the set of 'match' or 'no match' eCommerce solutions.
A second requirement to consider heavily is the visual metaphor. The question "Is this a standalone site, or a subdomain of a parent website" must be fully considered since most eCommerce sites are hosted as SAS on a different server than the 'main' website. With respect to my particular client, the intent was to provide an online shopping experience which provided a familiar -- but not identical -- visual metaphor so that visitors would recognize that they were in the right place, but visiting a shopping branch of the 'main' website.
Following some research, I concluded that one of the more feature-rich solutions was ShopSite®. Another of the many choices of potential solutions, though perhaps a little less feature-rich in some respects, was GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart®.
Solution: In the final analysis, my client chose GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart for reasons which were subjective to them. So my next steps were to climb the learning curve of configuring this package, employ GoDaddy's proprietary tools to present it under the visual metaphor we required, and implement the store and its various features. Quick Shopping Cart is hosted by GoDaddy, and initial account setup was very straightforward -- little more than obtaining a new domain, pointing it, entering basic company information, obtaining a security certificate, implementing the payment gateway, and choosing a 'template'. There are actually some very attractive template choices done by professional creatives -- though none of them mirrored the visual metaphor required for my client's website. So the real task involved to meet the objectives above required selecting a 'base' template which was close enough to work with, then downloading and reading the many css files which drove it, followed by modifying and "cascading" them using the "Advanced CSS" option (which was, happily, provided by Quick Shopping Cart) to match them to our objectives. This is all readily possible with the tools provided by GoDaddy, but the documentation is slim at best, and I spent one looong day of unbillable "professional development' to understand just how get this accomplished.
EXAMPLE
The 'parent' website for this client is here, and the web store (Online Shopping) which is now in the hands of the client to populate with categories and products, is here. This is a brand-new development, so there are few products in this store and I'd invite you to visit it again later in 2010 to see a fuller example.