I currently sell odds & sods on eBay and have been playing around with the idea of my own eCommerce enabled Web Site. I’m hoping you might have some recommendations.
I’m already familiar with Drupal (thanks to you) and use this for my own personal site/blog (www.davidhein.com). I also use Coppermine for my Photos (www.heindesignphotography.com) and have previously played around with Mambo, or Joomla as it’s now known. These are all hosted on my own small Server and I’m lucky enough to have an ADSL2+ connection with apx 10Mbps download / 1Mbps upload speeds.
The thing is I’m not looking at a major eCommerce site as a full time business, just something I can use time to time in conjunction with my casual eBay sales, to upload & sell products. These might be both physical and Digital such as my Photos.
The problem I’m having is finding a free Shopping Cart / eCommerce module with all the functionality that I’d like. Drupal has one but it lacks the ability to import inventory, and I’d rather not have to spend time setting up products a screen at a time. Mambo/Joomla seems to have a more advanced Shopping engine that DOES allow importing of inventory from a comma delimited file, but so far I haven’t been able to get this part to work.
Given that there’s heaps of free CMS systems out there, I wondering whether you’ve come across any others that are well suited for eCommerce with all the nice features built in. Ideally I’d like to install & maintain it myself as I like the ability to tweak the design of my own sites, but if there’s an online service that works well, is cheap and doesn’t charge commissions like eBay then I’d be happy to hear ideas on that too.