How do I start an e-commerce website?

Factual Questions
1

I have the website half of it - the domain name, a host, and I can throw together a template to put all the products in - but the e-commerce side of it, I can use some help with.

I don’t have and, because it looks like hell to set up, don’t want a merchant account. Instead, I’d prefer a service that acts as a payment processor and, ideally, shopping cart/inventory manager.

Now I know PayPal offers shopping cart functionality (what it does, basically, is create “add to cart” buttons for each item, and handles the shopping cart and the checkout half of things), but having an e-commerce site powered by PayPal seems a little unprofessional (and I believe it’s a tad more hassle on the consumer side, but I’m not sure of this).

Also, all it does is generate the buttons for the cart. Ideally, I’d like something with an interface that can create the individual product pages with a minimum of information (product name, path to any images, etc.), so I don’t have to hand code each image and each link.

I’ve been looking at some payment processors (iBill, Revecom, 2checkout, PayPal, ccbill, each at their own .com) and though I think any of them would do for the payment processing part, I’d like a more robust product management tool on the back end. I’m looking for something that has a reasonable setup cost ($250 or less) and monthly/transaction fees.

I’m open to suggestions, either on a product as I’ve described above or, if I’m going about this in all the wrong ways, I’d appreciate being set straight.

2

Oh, I should have probably mentioned some server stuff.

Basically, this is the tech my server supports:
Apache Web Server
MySQL Databases
Personal CGI-BIN
PHP4 and Perl 5

I should probably mention that although these technologies are available, I don’t know much about any of them, so any installation should be largely automated (I can change file paths and stuff if necessary, but I can’t make a SQL table, for instance).

3

Perhaps something like www.bigstep.com?

4

A few times when I buy from big stores they are using a Yahoo Store URL. So I would guess that Yahoo has a cool solution for you.

5

I’ve seen a couple of Paypal front ends floating around on the various script sites. They seem to range between $15 and $45, and look pretty professional. Much less of a hassle than getting somebody to write your own or setting up one of the free packages.

Check resourceindex.com and hotscripts.com.

6

Also talk to your bank about setting up a merchant credit card account with the credit card machine. If you do a lot of sales, it might be cheaper to have this. Paypal takes 4% or so of your funds, I think.