Ecommerce question

[pghdesigner]

I'm a web designer with very little experience in ecommerce. I develop sites that are more informational rather than ecommerce.

A friend of a friend wants his small business put on the web as an ecommerce site and I was asked to develop it. He wants his customers to have the option to pay by credit card and such. Now I'd like to get experience in developing these type of sites. As silly as it sounds, I'm not sure how you ecommerce developers build these sites.. meaning what programs/software do you typically use? Cause I can't imagine you guys hand coding all these sites. I looked into Magneto. But I sure as hell am not paying 3,000. That's just ridiculous. I looked into their free edition but I don't know anything about it.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

[sampathneo]

Please use open source eCommerce script such as oScommerce

 

[Pheno]

You don't need to pay 3000 for Magento. The community edition is fine for most websites.

 

[plusoner]

CRE Loaded or even 3d Cart are good options.

 

[Janja]

I recommend wordpress with either a free shopping cart plug-in like eshop or wp-shopping cart. They are free, easy to use and you can find tons of tutorials on youtube and wordpress.org.
I used zencart before but I think if it's confusing to me, how is my customer supposed to handle it?

 

[expo09]

Remember the security issues. You need to be able to insure that your customers knows that it will be safe to make payments through their site, both from their point of view and their customers. You are dealing with people's bank details so the security has to be water-tight.