Advice needed for designing e Commerce site

[Online321]

Hello,

I am new to this forum and any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am starting a online retail store (e Commerce). I will be selling furniture and electronics. I am having trouble figuring out which features are the most important and a must, should I use a custom designed shopping cart or 1shoppingcart or 1merchantcart. I am going through elance.com for my webdevelopment. I have a had a lot bids and found a company in the U.S who seems to be pretty good. However, the issue I am having is I don't really know much about eCommerce sites. There seems to be so much to learn. I am very willing to learn and study but I have yet to find a source that really breaks everything down. I find bits and pieces. I want a site that is done right, search engine friendly, customer friendly, easy to navigate, and has lots of current information. I don't want to pay to have this site built only to find out it wasn't done right or in the most beneficial way.

What do suggest for shopping cart, web content, hosting and why?

Thanks a lot,
Online321

[The Old Sarge]

First things I need to ask are:

How will you handle inventory? Will you be drop shipping? Actual on-hand inventory? Will you sell world wide or only in the US?

[Online321]

First things I need to ask are:

How will you handle inventory? Will you be drop shipping? Actual on-hand inventory? Will you sell world wide or only in the US?

Thanks for Reply,
I will be drop shipping all of the merchandise. I am already doing it on eBay and it is working very well for me but I believe I can be a lot more successful on the internet. I will only ship to U.S and Canada. My drop shipper usually gets orders out same day.

Online321