New Eccomerce site help

I am about buying ecommerce software, like x-cart, or else.
to be honest, no idea how to set up this software.
What should i do?
Also is there any recommended softwares withy ASP?
is ASP better then PHP?

Thanks for your advises.

before buying, ask if it is something you can do yourself. many ecomemrce packages require someone with experience and if that's the case, the seller should be able to find someone for you.

if it is something that the website owner can do, then the instruction manual will have everything you need to know.

PHP vs. ASP, well that's a "religious" issue -- PHP if you are not a Microsoft shop. ASP if you are a Microsoft shop.

Kind of disagree fundamentally. The choice of the environment for e-commerce type of applications in Fortune 500 is Java, not ASP and/or PHP. Why? The suggestion to do it as "homegrown" is very dangerous. There are so many available “shopping carts” programs commercial and free of charge.

but we're talking small business here, not Fortune 500. Obviously, it all depends on the size of the business you have -- and there are surely some small businesses who can afford to have a Java programmer on call -- but I don't think anyone wants to invest $100,000 in a shopping cart if they're only hoping to do $200,000 in sales.

1. out-of-box ready to go portal with support of the same portlets as in WebSphere.
2. shopping cart with a credit card processing support (you need to get your own merchant account). It will reduce a cost of cc processing to the absolute minimum.
3. Community Forums built-in.
4. Built-in 100 different portlets to do many business/community functions
5. 2 built in databases
6. Support for internationalization/localization
7. User authentication/authorization
9. Support for WAP enabled phones/PDA. Your users will be able to access your server via mobile devices.
10. All customization, personalization (selection of colors, texts,etc) is in flat files - no programming required.
11. almost all context is dynamic - easy maintenance.
12. many more functionalities.

Send me e-mail for additional info.

Sorry, it should be this way:

That is exactly the point. This is a fraud perpetrated by the "big" vendors that you need $100,000.00 - $300,000.00 in order to have a contemporary Java based Internet infrastructure. I know for sure that solution similar to "e-business On-Demand" from the IBM could be obtained for less than $5,000.00. Now, let me tell you what you get for this money:

1. out-of-box ready to go portal with support of the same portlets as in WebSphere.
2. shopping cart with a credit card processing support (you need to get your own merchant account). It will reduce a cost of cc processing to the absolute minimum.
3. Community Forums built-in.
4. Built-in 100 different portlets to do many business/community functions
5. 2 built in databases
6. Support for internationalization/localization
7. User authentication/authorization
9. Support for WAP enabled phones/PDA. Your users will be able to access your server via mobile devices.
10. All customization, personalization (selection of colors, texts,etc) is in flat files - no programming required.
11. almost all context is dynamic - easy maintenance.
12. many more functionalities.

Send me an e-mail if you need additional information.