Ecommerce for dummies?

Factual Questions
1

I have a small website from which I want to sell Tshirts and other things I’m designing. My question is, what solutions are out there for someone who wants to be able to sell things online and accept credit cards payments easily and without lots of programming knowledge?

So far I’ve investigated two methods.

First, paypal. The advantages of this are that I was able to sucessfully place a fake buy button on a test website and have my friend ‘buy’ something from me using his credit card and I got sent the money. The disadvantages include that I still have to manually design all the pages and copy and paste the button codes into the site, and also that i’ve heard rumors of paypal having plans to make transferring money into your bank account more difficult.

Second, there is supposedly some kind of built in ecommerce solution with my host, www.powweb.com. But the tutorial for it seems to involve confusing installation procedures and I’m not sure how it integrates with a website.

Some things I’m looking for (all would be lovely but I’ll take as many as I can get!):

  1. Easy to do / no fiddling with PHP and UNIX and whatever…

  2. Some sort of (Mac friendly) interface application that automatically creates the shopping catalog/cart html and thumnailing and uploads it to my site.

  3. Will take credit cards without fussing with registrations and such, will pay me with minimum of transaction fees, and minimum of hassles in transferring money to my bank account or sending me a check.

  4. Cheap, one time fee for application or setup, and no ongiong fees other than minimal transaction fees.

  5. Some sort of web admin with shop side utilities such as inventory, etc.

  6. Can handle things like taxes, colors and sizes, automatic shipping costs, etc.

  7. Whatever will make my life easier in general! :wink:

Would love to hear from people 1) any general comparative notes on small level ecommerce solutions, 2) testimonials about specific ecommerce solutions you guys are actually using maybe with links to your site and 3) whatever else you might think is helpful

Thanks!

2

I’ve heard good reviews of osCommerce, but I’ve never used them myself. Their website seems to be easy to navigate - it might be worth having a look at them.