Aloha folks,
Please allow me to introduce myself. We deal with Kava, a herbal supplement and a sacred Hawaiian root and have decided to go online from our farmers market venues. A successful Kava website in my opinion is www.konakavafarm.com and we'll have some similar products.

Since I have no programming skills so I opted to go the hosted solutions route rather than the OS way, although it's the smarter and cheaper route in the long run. With our labor intensive product, running the shipping department and customer service dept, I'll learn code when the sun freezes over at this rate.

After going thru 20 or so hosted solutions, and mostly reading about your opinions & comments on them (for days, non stop ), I have picked a few. In no specific order, they are Volusion, Core Commerce and Interspire.
If you have any say about any of these, please do. If you wish to recommend something else, I am totally open to that as well. Wish I could work Magento which is too cool for OS software out there.

These are issues that are probably addressed at some point, but ones I could not get an answer to. Your help with these is really appreciated.

1. Is there a solution that really allows and gives one room to tinker with the front and back end for for SEO and SEM? This is a very important factor to me obviously. I understand that OS is better in this area, but there must be a SEO-able winner amongst the hosted solutions me thinks. what do you think?
As time goes by, this will be the area I will be working with the most. I am planning on starting with adwords and that's pretty much what I can think of for SEM. Any suggestions on any first SEO/SEM steps I should take after the website is fully operational?

3. Are there hosted solutions that have better hosting than others? Faster loading pages, images, etc. Dedicated hosting gets pretty steep.
Volusion's bandwidth limitation is not appealing. Is there a middle path "solution" in speed and bandwidth in your opinion?

4. I truly believe that a professional website is crucial. First impressions are last impressions when we have a few seconds to keep them interested after the first glance at our sites.
Which hosted solution really delivers in this area and should I be looking into customizing templates from them or just choosing a template (wondering if customizing will help with the SEO)

that's all I can think of right now. If you have any suggestions or recommended readings, please let me know.

thanks very much for reading and aloha to you all,
Demiurgic