I'm a "newbie" to the world of eCommerce and setting up web sites, although I have had some very limited HTML experience developing screen mockups for a recent project with my soon-to-be ex-employer. I have been a software developer for fifteen years, although most of that was supporting legacy applications that were written in COBOL.


I will soon be embarking in a new direction - developing and supporting an eCommerce application that will sell durable medical equipment. My partner in this endeavor would like to get a functional site up and running within the next couple of months; therefore, we have been considering the services of some of the eCommerce hosting services that provide the complete, all-in-one storefront packages - everything from the domain registration, merchant account, etc., to the storefront templates, shopping cart, database, etc. itself. The original idea was to get the store up and running quickly and try to start developing a web presence using a "canned product", and then possibly customize the site later if desired. We started out by looking at a couple of the more widely advertized providers like GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart or Yahoo's SiteBuilder, but after discoveing this forum I thought it would be a good idea to get some suggestions from some folks who had been down this road before. I have seen some good recommendations for Lunarpages and Midphase Hosting. Also, a friend sent me a link for a company called Nexternal who claims to be using AJAX technology in their solution.

Has anyone had any experience good or bad with the providers mentioned above? Any other good eCommerce providers you would recommend?
I have already found a lot of good general information on this forum about SEO, marketing, support, etc., and I would appreciate any advice that some of the guru's could provide. I am really looking forward to learning as much as possible about the eCommerce world.
Thanks for all the help!

I would reccomend osComerce or ZendCart for your shopping cart. They are both very good eCommerce packages that can be customized easily.
Once you decide on a package and hosting, you can get something up pretty quickly and then start with the other important things such as SSL and merchant account integration.

I would stay away from GoDaddy and Yahoo's solutions, in fact don't use any proprietary package offered by the hosting provider. You will want something that you can take with you if you decide to move your site to a different host.

Many hosts provide inbuild e-commerce shopping cart with thier hosting package. Some has advance carts which can easily be integrated with payment gateways. Check some of the hosts at
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