newbe needs some direction, plz help

Hi all,

I’m new to this forum and relatively new to e-commerce all together. I own a business in upstate NY that sells flags, flagpoles, and just about everything related. business has been slowly growing for a few years but i was looking to get bigger. I bought a .com domain and a hosting package with godaddy.com.
the web site is up and working. for a customer to actually make a purchase they have to memorize the item number they want, then go to a "order form" page to put in the information.
I want to have a shopping cart like most websites that sell things. go daddy has an additional package, some sort of a store builder. but this comes with an additional charge and the website becomes a template. I’m not totally opposed to the template idea however I prefer having the freedom of using my own XHTML and CSS.
I guess what I’m asking is how does a shopping cart work, what’s behind the scenes? is it software that needs to be installed on a server of my own? can i write some kind of script of php that makes a cart? am i stuck with go daddy and their templates that i have to pay for?
I have other questions about how to use a database so i don’t have to make a single html page for each of my 1000+ products but i should save that for another thread.
Any information at all will be appreciated here. I'm just being introduced to all these different things and its all a little overwhelming.

Hello The_Spark and welcome to the forums.

I have a background in e-commerce and have helped quite a few with cart systems over the years. While some might disagree, I have always found GoDaddy a difficult host to work with in the area of shopping carts. It is possible to use any of the free or open source shops on their servers, there have always been problems and I don't recommend them. There are many good shared hosting companies that provide carts and the installation through a system called Fantastico. The installation is incredibly simple and databases are set up automatically and all the guess-work is done for you so you end up with a fully functional shop in a matter of minutes. The addition of categories and products is accomplished through a back-end or administration system which includes shipping, payment, taxes and graphic uploads. Some of these carts are Cube Cart, OScommerce and Zen Cart to name a few. You can also get an SSL certificate to secure online transactions.

If you want recommendations, PM me and I'll be happy to nudge you in the right direction.

You should check to see what server side language (ASP, .NET, PHP) and database (MS Access, MSSQL, mysql) that your server supports. And then you can probably install your own shopping cart.

You might need an SSL cert as well and this will require a dedicated IP address if you wish to process credit cards on your website. You might also be able to use a shared SSL from Godaddy. A lot of payment gateways also will give you a secure web page to use to capture and process the credit card transaction.

I have had good luck with MidPhase. They have fantasico and it will install CubeCart, osCommerce and Zen Cart. The installation is very quick and you could have a store running in less than a week.

Ideally if you have your products in a .csv file you could upload your products very quickly. A lot of times your vendors can provide you with such a file easing your upload time.

My vote goes to CubeCart as the cart I would use. It is capable of the .csv file and handles SEO very well. My cart is a month old and just broke into Alexa's 100k rank today.

Do not forget CRE Loaded ;-) similar to Zen...but not Zen. There is also Vitruemart if you want to have lots of content management pages.

In short DO NOT reinvent the wheel. If you want to sell products you MUST have a shopping cart. Use any of the open source carts. If you use CRE or Zen or VM, the template system is dynamic no matter how many pages you add.