Online shopping carts

[Spano]

Any of you folks have experience setting up and administering online shopping carts?

A friend would like to sell some photo prints online. At this point the catalog would contain 12 to 24 images, but could expand to 48 or 100 images.

Any caveats for purchasing hosting space for this type of enterprise? Pretty sure I'll want Linux hosting, but what features are essential? PHP Perl etc. etc.

I'm looking into oscommerce for cart set up and scripts, any others I should check? Ideally would like a store/cart that I can style with css.

Thanks for any advice.

[jflaker]

probably the best option would be a PHP and MySQL hosting with osCommerce as your cart. osCommerce can communicate with paypal and track your sales........


os = Open Source.......Powerful and effective app.

Consideration would be to keep track of your traffic and adjust your hosting plan as needed. If you opt for a basic plan with limited bandwidth and you get popular....the overage charges, much like cell phone services, can be alot more than just buying extra bandwidth.

[KCPokes]

Depends on whether you are building the site from the ground up, in which case OSCommerce will work. If you have an existing site, using CSS, you'll find that Zencart is much easier to work with, in my opinion. I've set them both up and the amount of layout flexibility with OSCommerce just wasn't what I needed.

[Lostincyberspace]

There are alot off these out there. This place has a bunch with instructions and demos.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

[Spano]

Thanks for your replies - very helpful.

[Lostincyberspace]

When you get it running put the link up.

[Spano]

Lost, I'll do that. Won't be until first week February.