I work in IT but do very little Web stuff. Im also not very good at designing stuff like this to look pretty so thinking template based.

Don't want to pay a monthly charge for this in itself but guess may need to pay a little for hosting.

Won't be major traffic and literally 2 or 3 items to begin with and just PayPal for payments is fine.

I did something a few years ago using dreamweaver and just paypal buttons which worked but not pretty.

I've started to look and seen esCommerce and zencart. Anyone using these?

I am happy with mysql and can muddle through with phP etc


I tried a search but only a couple if results and they were years old

I know SEO is key and a whole new subject.

Thanks in advance

Opencart is easy to use.

I decided against it, but my mate kept with it:

http://lasercutz.co.uk/shop/index.php?route=common/home

When I ran my IT company I used OSCommerce on justparts.co.uk (nothing there now but sedo parking) as a demo site. It was dead easy to setup and customise.

[Edited on 11/4/15 by joneh]

You need to look at Prestashop

You can sign up to the "cloud" edition which is FREE to host.
There are loads of bolt on's which allow you to customise your website in whatever way you want.

The way they make their money is in upgrades. i.e. if you want an ecommerce store with connectivity to sagepay, you have to buy it.

It's a superb ecommerce platform, only drawback is that it won't support millions of users at the same time - it's more small business than SME, but hopefully by that time, you will be able to fund some "proper" ecommerce.

If you're looking at hosting, then look no further than the cloud - I would recommend Cloudways

That should give you enough of a platform to get you up and running.

I'm part way through moving from 123reg hosted ecommerce to my own Magento install.
Very easy to setup, thousands of templates and the back end gives you a lot of control.

I second Prestashop but look at the turnkey version - download the appliance for complete ease of use. Www.turnkeylinux.org they create lots of other useful appliances and straight installs too.