My brother, a lawyer, is starting a web-based t-shirt/accessories business (an LLC) as a side job with a couple of his colleagues, and I was offered a contract to basically maintain the website side of the business if I could find a good e-store and website provider.

I don't have much experience at all with maintaining any kind of e-store, even though I'm sure I could manage, and because of that I am at a loss of even where to start looking. I googled various web providers that seem to offer what I need, but it is really hard to separate the good from the bad and to interpret what exactly their systems have to offer.

I basically need something that is relatively simple to use and maintain, but with somewhat flexible options (pictures for each item, shopping cart, credit card payments via Paypal or other, etc.). I thought about using open-source Wordpress software on an independent provider and trying to find some sort of third-party paypal/store plugin, but I'm not sure that is available.

Any suggestions? I'm not looking to write my own HTML/JS... I'm looking for more of a click-n-build kind of thing.

Magento is basically the WordPress of e-store software. It seems to work pretty well, but can be a resource hog. Probably fine for a low traffic side business though.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Any suggestions? I'm not looking to write my own HTML/JS... I'm looking for more of a click-n-build kind of thing.

Depends on how serious your brother is with this business.

Click-n-builds are easy to put together but fail when customization comes into play and forget about any effective SEO. The website will look canned and most of the times the click-n-builds include crap on the websites that is not needed and clutters the UI confusing the user experience.

What it comes down to is "you get what you pay for".

There are many open source solutions out there that let you customize a store down to the template and you can override settings to include specific elelements that match the business, including SEO.

Or, you can hire a developer to build up a custom solution, you would get excellent branding, customized SEO, an e-commerce solution that mimicks your business model and a final product that stands out above all of the other canned crap e-commerce solutions that plauge the net.

Good luck and let me know if you need a web developer to put together a unique and efficient e-commerce solution.

Cheers,

Take a look at Miva Merchant (http://www.mivamerchant.com), very easy to use admin and very easy to configure. Its been around for years and they offer good tech support and a wealth of easily installable and configurable modules to expand the functionality.

One of the better e-commerce hosting companies would be Hostasaurus (http://www.hostasaurus.com) again top of the line support and fast linux servers. You can lease the store license with web hosting to start at around $37 bucks a month.

A good starter merchant account is PayPal website payments pro.

We specialize in web sites for small and medium businesses and have launched quite a few start-ups that have grown quite well into the 2-5 million dollars in Internet sales range.

Thank you all so much for the tips and suggestions... much appreciated.

Magento looks highly versatile and I'll keep it in mind if I end up with with a compatible hosting solution, Lokase I'll keep what you said in mind, and Rover I will definitely consider your suggestion, as it seems like the best fit for now.