Sick of eBay/amazon-- Shopping Cart advice

[abowlofsoda]

Hello there. New to this site...

I recently started getting fed up with eBay and Amazon and always wanted my own website. Well a few days ago I pulled the trigger and got myself a domain name and hosting.

I spent the last 3 days researching long hours on how to get a shopping cart setup for this website. I have very little HTML knowledge.

At first I was going to get a free shopping cart through the quick install of the CPanel at my hosting (HostGator) but then started deciding on hosted shopping cart.
I almost payed for the Yahoo Ecommerce Store at $30 a month... it says its 1.5% fee on every sale which sounds reasonable to me but I was reading some reviews and that was being blasted as a no-no.

Hosting is already $15 + $30 for a shopping cart + SSL? + merchant account monthly?

I'm lost on what I need to be honest. I don't need fancy template or anything. I just want a left column with categories, a small logo top left, and grid view for new items on the front page.
I will be selling an items that I might possibly be the only person selling a good amount of the time and maybe 1 or 2 competition sites with the item as 'out of stock'...
Alot of my traffic on ebay is from Google searches.

Can someone point me in the right direction? I've done the research and I'm still at a loss on how to go about this at a decent price point per month. I don't need all those features they are selling.
I do need easy inventory listing/managing tho.

[oliondor]

Welcome !

This is a good move, if you sell online you shouldn't work for the monkeys, do your own shop to be really free.

For your needs it seems that any ecommerce as Magento or others should be ok ?

Whatever you will use it will take time but don't give up and you will succeed !

[abowlofsoda]

I looked at the Magento site. Can't figure if I need the free one or is there something in that Magento Go $15 a month that I need. I just don't know enough. Guess I could try the free one to get started.

So I'd have to find a merchant account to use with that? And I'd need an SSL cert?

I'll have a minimum of 600 of USED products and will be scaling up about 100 used items a month.

[oliondor]

Unfortunately the easiest to start with are Paypal and 2Checkout...

[abowlofsoda]

I got Magento installed from the quickinstall of my hosting.. I can make categories but can't seem to figure out how to get them on the homepage. Google searches turn up pasting code here and there.

Sigh. Not enough hours in the day to get this thing off the ground anytime soon if I have a steep learning curve ahead of me.

I'm curious if the commercial carts are any easier.

[nubbin]

Magento will be too complicated for your needs.
If you want to get going really quickly have a look at shopify.com

If you want to build your own store and are prepared to invest a few weeks doing it I recommend opencart

I've been running ecommerce sites for my business since the late 90s.

[abowlofsoda]

Thanks for the replies everyone, I sure appreciate all the direction and help I can get.

I did look in to Shopify. At that price point per month I'd hate to get down the road a bit and not like it.

But I do understand I gotta start somewhere so those hosted carts are looking pretty tempting to get something going quick.

The clean white background with navigation on the left side and big Add to Cart button that goes to Paypal. How do I intergrate that Paypal in to it? Is that a service too or is it just the add a paypal button I keep seeing in tutorials, pasting the code in to every single item... that part doesn't look efficient to me... looks more like designing every single page.

[edited by: lorax at 11:13 am (utc) on Aug 26, 2013]
[edit reason] No example URLs please [/edit]