Many products - Yahoo! store or ??

which way to go?

[lazy_guy]

if you were asked to build an online retail shop with around 30 to 50 brands, would yahoo store be the easiest way to go for a noob?

Would it be foolish to not use a cms for such a large store and could yahoo be considered a cms in a sense?

Does anyone have a cms that could be used pretty much out of the box for a retail store that would be free/cheap?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm just trying to get this massive project off on the right foot.

Thanks in advance.

[andye]

Does anyone have a cms that could be used pretty much out of the box for a retail store that would be free/cheap

osCommerce maybe? (I've not used it myself).

best, a.

[FalseDawn]

By "cms", do you really mean "shopping cart software"?
oscommerce is ok - there are others like x-cart, zencart etc too.
In these cases, you build your content up "around" the cart, you do not add cart functionality to a content site. This shouldn't be a problem if you are starting from scratch.
Also depends on how confident you are in PHP/MySQL, as anything but copy/paste and trivial tweaks to open source software will need a bit of technical knowledge.

[lazy_guy]

Thanks for the input.

Am I wrong in thinking that with yahoo store... that I can plug everything in and just make the front-end for it?

yahoo gives the impression that there's no back-end involved for the webmaster.

[Stores]

Yahoo makes it pretty easy to get up and running quickly. Full customization will require you to learn their proprietary language called RTML.