Simple e-commerce platform?

[Drew]

I need to set up a page for my dad where he can sell 1 item online, I know there's some options out there where they handle the credit card aspect of it, give you some code, etc. I haven't registered his page yet so any registrar would be fine if they do it themselves. Does anyone have any recommendations?

[crb]

It depends how much money you want to put into it. You could just do a yahoo store, or sell through Amazon, but if you want to spend more money...

OSCommerce or CRE Loaded OScommerce - free or cheap, but what you need to then pay for is a coder to make it work for you, shitty and convoluted software. There is also Zencart, which is another OSC varietal.

I like the newest version of Cubecart right now. It isn't perfect, but pretty good, and fairly easy to skin for anyone with a little CSS/HTML knowledge. $200 I believe

Magento is free, but is horrible bloatware and has some simple usability problems. But mostly just bloatware.

Two I've not used are xcart and litecommerce.

Then payment options you can go a variety of routes.

1. Paypal, not that bad, transaction fees can be killer, and paypal has a history of fucking over merchants in fraud disputes. no setup.

2. third party processor, like 2checkout.com, higher transaction fees, but a little better than paypal in the fraud department. $49 setup

3. full merchant account. You'll pay $100 or so for setup typically, then around 2.2% for card-not-present transactions, $20 a month for gateway (such as authorize.net) and misc fees.

If you're going to be shipping with USPS, look into paypal hard. They have a REALLY nice shipping tool called "multiship" where you can easily process ship and print labels for all your daily orders in a few minutes. Really nice.

[Gan]

I use authorize.net for my site.

[Drew]

Thanks for the info. My dad has a book that has been published, but if he sells his own copies he gets much more money than the standard royalties. His publisher is fine with him selling it on his own website so he asked me to set this up. I have a feeling he probably won't sell more than 20-50 copies a month on his website, so I need a cheap solution.