Shopping Cart: Fresh e-com site I will be building

Need to know what you think will be best?

[deanril]

Im interested in an Ecomerce cart and was interested in what you think would be the best. I have done a site search allready and have not come up with an exact solution yet.

I currently have a ecomerce site, and about 1200 products, I want to build a whole new site, BUT the data that I have is in .xls files, that I convert to tab-delimted ones (currently then upload).

I would also like to use a good hosting company(recomandations?), and maybe if they include a customizeable cart.

I have to custimize a couple fields only really, would pay to have that done aswell, so maybe a cart that has programmer support, where I can pay to have the mods done to relatively easily.

Also, I am a newby, I want to build my site with great graphical appearance, Im thinking of buying a Template, using that( I can work with Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver MX extensively, no problems in that aspect), then I would want to intergrate the cart into the template, or visa vera(most likely) to keep up the graphics all the way through website.

Price: I would like to get it with my hosting company.
Will spend money if I can use a CART Program, on multiple sites.

Flexability: be able to use my existing data .xls files with prenamed feilds, that I can custimize the cart to these fields, like:

"PartNo Title Description Category2 Image1 ListPrice Category3 Category4 Image2 Category1"

I can easily convert these to the carts fields.

Sorting features: by price, and in one of my fields its actually size(category 2 is), so abilty to sort and that type of thing.

I have been reading about:

Storefront - great, Im going to be using this on a different site made by a menmber here, the storfront software we are using cost $1000 ,and the site is going to be awesome, and I will maintain and put all the products like my current site. But I want to build(by myself) a cheaper solution aswell.

Oscomerce - here good things seems like alot of people like it, FREE

Miva - seems restrictive.....

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as you are the Experts!

[netcommr]

If your selling retail to the general pop, don't think about it, Yahoo store. The traffic sent to you from Yahoo shopping is worth any shortcoming of the system.

else
Minivend [minivend.networq.com] is a choice.

[deanril]

Thank you, Im selling to the genral public, havent ever liked any Yahoo store Ive seen, but I will investigate, thank you agin!

[kanetrain]

here are a few Yahoo stores that seem to look pretty good:

[chefsresource.com...]

[store.scrapbook.com...]

[kindertrains.com...]

Yahoo store is a pain to build in, but it can be done. There are other benefits to Yahoo Store too. If you really don't like Yahoo store, try instantestore.com.
I've built on several platforms. They are great. Cold Fusion based and pretty cool features.

[deanril]

Thank you very much, that is real helpful information , I really appreciate it.

Ill look into those more!