Some great pieces of software out there for e-commerce solutions include:

  • X-Cart
  • osCommerce
  • Miva Merchant

osCommerce is an open source application that is highly customizable given some knowledge of PHP. It is a free application that can be downloaded at http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/downloads (being free can keep your business costs down, so this can be a great e-commerce solution for a business). If you are familiar with and have SSH access to an account with your hosting provider, you can then install the application yourself, or you may want to ask your host to help you with doing that.

X-Cart and Miva Merchant are both proprietary pieces of software. I’ll talk a little about Miva Merchant as I do not have to much experience with X-Cart. Miva is something that you may find with some packages provided by various hosting providers. The later versions are pretty smooth and allow you to customize the page layout quite a bit with minimal HTML knowledge.

So, if you’re looking for an e-commerce solution and need to build the site yourself but you don’t have any web design experience, look for a hosting package that will come with something like osCommerce, Miva Merchant, or X-Cart. All of these applications will provide a nice interface to work with to allow you to easily built and customize the store yourself. You can always keep the default layout these applications provide if you’re not to technical with web design (i.e. no web design experience).

The only other thing you need for these would be an account with a merchant/gateway provider such as PayQuake, Authorize.net. This will allow your customers to make a purchase and the transaction will get linked to the gateway provider that will likely act as a merchant provider as well and hold your funds for you. The e-commerce applications mentioned make it really easy for you to link to your merchant/gateway provider, which by the way would be an extra service from a separate (likely) company than your hosting provider.