Heres a quick article overviewing some of the major options, including just throwing in some paypal buttons on your existing site. (My instinct tells me it wont be half as easy as it sounds... and what about inventory etc...)
http://www.askingfortrouble.org/crafts/2008/04/23/guide-to-setting-up-shop-online/
Hosted solutions:
Shopify
Seriously considering, although the product limit is stingey.
Cons: Takes a 2% swipe at your sales.
Pros: I can be an affiliate and get some kickbacks from my friends sales... nice. This is enticing... But doubt it'll be a huge amount.
Big Cartel
Seriously considering, product limit of 300 is pretty decent for $30p/m. And I like the word Cartel. And it has AUD currency, and it seems nice and indie, and has free trial.
Cons: its limited to Paypal payments it seems.
Does it have an affiliate program...?? No, dosnt look like it, otherwise id be sold. Actually im over this im sold right now.
Local company love...
Amazing Price for custom design shop, under $1K (initial cost):
http://www.magicdust.com.au/shopping-cart/shopping-cart-prices.html
http://www.magicdust.com.au/shopping-cart/shopping-cart-features.html
Although, the hosting / ongoing cost is expensive, $49.50p/m, its a good option for a small initial outlay AND a custom design.
Heres an example:
https://beatpoet.net/store/
Actually... the above is a pretty good deal IF you have the initial $895+GST, Id say this is the best deal out there... because for that price your getting a custom design AND a hosted solution. No fucking around templating / server troubleshooting. The software feature list is impressive too, including email newsletters etc... the space, 100MB and the bandwidth, 2GB im not sure if thats enough, probably would need to upgrade to larger hosting plan, so cost might increase.
Actually when you compare other hosted solutions, eg big cartel, and shopify, this is a pretty good deal, because there is no limit on how many products you can have... just the hosting size restriction. eg. Big Cartel is $30p/m, for 300 products, and shopify is $24 for 100 products. If my client had $895 to spend Id probably go there and be done with it...
More local people:
Not sure of cost but does local designers shops
http://www.nichefashion.com.au/pages/niche_web.php
Wordpress
Theres some nice templates out there, but im wary because of WPs security stuff, do i really want to be patching updates for my friends shop for free for the rest of my life... no.
Magento:
Never used magento, maybe because it is $2995 per year, theres a community option but not sure if it would be just for people that know what they are doing. Im guessing Magento is for serious stores, rather than smaller / hobby stores. I wonder how it compares to wordpress e-commerce? There seems to be lots of templates for it.
ZenCart:
Im thinking of going with zencart, since its free and dedicated for e-commerce, its bound to have way better features than wp shops. one things ive not considered is the actual usability for the store owner, eg printing invoices, packing slips, sales reports, inventory, etc etc, eg the back end rather than the pretty front end. this is what really counts. handling of tax etc etc. AND security. WP is so insecure and fuck all those updates.
Actually, on further inspection fuck that. I dont want to host this thing for free on my hosting, monitor security, update it, and get some SSL certificates and all that, its just a whole lot of faffing around for a no budget favour job.
Prestashop:
This looks cool, reckons has large community, here a setup tutorial
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/tutorials/beginners-guide-prestashop/
Paypal
User needs to sign up with a merch account, heres some info
https://merchant.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/compare_wp_products
(aside, the paypal site is kinda confusing to use... just like amazon and facebook, why is this so?)
Random reviews from round web:
Wordpress
I’ve had the same problem with WP-Ecommerce and I’ve had it fail on PCI scan for cross-scripting vulnerabilities. They simply don’t comment back on their forums. Its quite frustrating. I’ve had a problem where the tax was not being send to Google Checkout. Without support resolve issues like that. Its pretty much useless to my clients.
http://www.websitetemplatereviews.com/my-list-of-the-best-e-commerce-website-templates-a-big-chart
Disadvantages include having to integrate shopping cart functionality and perhaps having to upgrade your hosting to an SSL certificate level.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-e-commerce-problems-that-must-be-addressed-before-this-plugin-can-be-taken-seriously
http://www.tyroneshum.com/wp-e-commerce-review-for-wordpress/
review of the plugins features...
Shopify
http://www.ashwebstudio.com/reviews/shopify-great-for-simple-e-commerce
Cost – As always, the cost is always an important factor when determining which e-commerce solution to use. Shopify has multiple plan levels each with their specific cost, but in general the average website will be paying a monthly fee of $24 and 2% per transaction. Many other (decent) shopping cart systems can cost around $500 just for the software. Shopify is a hosted solution meaning you don’t need to pay for web hosting and they have their own SSL certificate. With hosting being $10-15/month and SSL certificates about $10/month, that basically covers the monthly Shopify cost meaning the only thing you really pay them is the 2% per transaction fee. For smaller shops with few transactions or small transactions, this 2% is not very much and can easily be overcome with a slight shipping cost increase.
@Adrian We are upfront with our clients about Shopify, we do not try to “hide” it in any way. You can’t hide it anyway since they see Shopify’s logo every time they login! We have our clients setup an account on Shopify (using our referral link, of course) and then we get admin access and go from there. Trying to inflate the monthly cost is not possible as they will quickly find out they can get the same thing for less. Just passing the cost on to the client, through you, is a waste of everyone’s time since the client can simply pay Shopify automatically each month.
http://forums.shopify.com/categories/1/posts/39087
From my former free-lancing experience, I can tell you that Shopify is much easier and fun to theme and customize. It also has a wonderful Restful XML API that lets you do anything you want, except 1) create orders (but you can capture payments, fulfil items, close, and re-open orders with that API) and 2) generate discount codes. Everything else goes. It also has an AJAX API that returns JSON. Shopify integrates with FEDEX, UPS, USPS, Amazon, etc. It integrates with all these payment gateways, using open-source ActiveMerchant which is also used by other e-commerce platforms. Shopify contributed Liquid and ActiveMerchant as open-source projects. Liquid was inspired by Django, and is currently the best templating engine in the world (yeah, me saying).
Shopify scales very well. You have to pay more with BigCommerce to be able to sustain high traffic. With Shopify, you don't have to. Also, we use a Content Delivery Network, this means that pages load as fast anywhere in the world - and that for me is a must.
Shopify has a great theme store with lots of great free themes, its own app store (very reasonably priced apps and many free apps, by Shopify and independent developers like yourself).
I think that it is best for any independent designer / developer to know 2 solutions well in whatever field he/she specializes in. Try and make those 2 favorites not solutions that are too smilar. For example: Shopify and Spree could be a good killer match in an e-commerce-oriented toolset.
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