What is the best out of the box ecommerce store to use that is customizable? Thanks!

http://bigcartel.com/

I was going to post Big Cartel, too. You might also want to check out Shopify.

Hey guys,

Thanks for these. BigCartel has some great design. I had seen it before just for pure design and never realized what it was used for. :) Might eventually have more than a 100 products so Shopify could be a good one but maybe starting with BigCartel would work best for now. These are great tips.

c

Hmm…I don’t have a ton of experience with e-commerce, but I’ll put in my two cents: Drupal (content management system) with the Ubercart module is extremely customizable. In my experience it has a quite a steep learning curve, but once you know what you’re doing, it seems like you can do anything with it (and there are plenty of books/resources out there to help you).

And I should also mention that Drupal+Ubercart is free.

Thanks there Frog. I really liked where BigCartel and Shopify were going. I hear ya on the Drupal stuff and was even thinking about Wordpress with an ecommerce setup too but the thing that seems to be the most sellable on Shopify so far is that they do the hosting, ssl, transactions, etc., etc., and you just stay on top of it and redesign the site in their editor. Pretty slick stuff.

Beside Shopify and BigCartel, I would recommend Izzonet. Going into Wordpress with it’s eCommerce plug-ins isn’t recommended. Although people familiar with Wordpress it’s SEO friendly and it’s quite easy to set up, creating an online based store via Wordpress has lot of disadvantage especially related to setting up online gateways. When your ecommerce business grows, and you have to process a large number of orders, the number of concurrent scripts that WordPress executes can overwhelm many web servers.