The out and out competition between the large sites, Amazon, ebay etc, the internet hosting providers such as 1and1 and iPage, and now providers majoring on the provision of web stores opencart as ekmpowershop leaves the ecommerce newbie with a massive choice of suppliers.

As ever choice is the adversary of simplicity so we try to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Sine Qua Not for
The sine qua not for, the irreducible minimum service, you can demand involves:

The Package
Your package must provide all of these to be in the game and:

Is easy to use and requires no programming or design skills or experience.
Should not involve you in downloading or buying special software
Produces instant results, or at least the inception of a commercial site within a day.
Can be used with other (existing) websites
Can process your instalments safely and
Be a complete solution, nothing else being required
Site Design
It should also provide cutting corners to ensure that you can get a good-looking site up and running

100+ different web templates controlling the appearance of your site so that you can choose one that matches your products and approach
The likelihood of sectors and categories which means your customers can find what they want — preferably with no more than three clicks
Simple addition of products — including alternatives (eg different product colours)
Simple things for adding, climbing and positioning your own images and artwork/
On-line Marketing
Then, once online, your site needs to be visible to your clients, most of whom uses search engines to find you and that requires:

The site to be search engine friendly (ie containing everything the search engines like to see and nothing they hate) with
active site promotion at no extra cost.
A Commercial Deal

with no contract or minimum rent time and
free extensions and improvements added all the time
Any package that doesn’t provide all of these without extra charges should not even be regarded.

Nice to Haves

Our ‘nice to haves’ are in reality ‘need to haves’ but it is possible to create systems for them away from your basic shop site. Mostly they relate to ‘back office’ functions including:

Order Processing. Your choice should either do this for you or produce reports that can be read straight into another package that allows you to see the proceedings behind the scenes
Accounting. Again you should either contain it within the package or be able to link the reports created by the package that can be read because of your accounting package — such as Sage
Marketing. It can save you plenty of work if the package allows you run promotions without being forced to re-enter all your products before and afterwards.
A conclusion
And endless choice of issues need to be considered when choosing an e-Commerce package but it is clearly a case where cheapest is always the lowest cost solution in the end.