Initial investment depends on your business you select..but mainly its for your website development and marketing.
I totally recommend Magento eCommerce platform, I see XCART people is here posting on this thread but Magento is just wayyy better
I vote for opencart. fast, simple and easy to setup and use magento is nice, but very feature-packed...most people might not need all the features, so it might be too overwhelming.
Couple of our customers with thousands of products used e-commerce carts by Reditus. Not sure what's involved though..
I once came across a jewelry dropshipping website that needed $1000 initial investment to let you open your own ecom store selling jewelry. Just FYI
The initial investment depends on your products of business, but for e commerce mainly you need a domain name, hosting space and installing choice of shopping cart and display products in your shop then you go marketing.
Here are the few things you will need to invest in - the cost will vary based upon how engaging experience you want to build: 1. Site User Experience Design - You can select from available templates or you can create a highly customized experience for your offering. 2. eCommerce Platform - Go with an open source platform such as OS Commerce or Magento so you dont have to pay initial or monthly licensing fees. 3. SEO - you would need to invest in building organic traffic to your website. 4. Affiliate marketing - you should sign up with an affiliate channel such as Avantlink to drive affiliate traffic. 5. Hosting - you can start with a shared hosting plan and then move to VPS or dedicated as your site scales. 6. Payment Gateway - you would need to partner with a payment gateway provider for accepting electronic payments. 7. Online Marketing - depending upon how fast you want to ramp up visitors, you would need to spend money on Ad networks, Google adwords etc. to drive paid traffic to your site. I believe these are some of the big categories.
I utilize the yahoo store for everything. It is super simple and for newbies like myself it is rather amazing. Yes, it is a bit more costly but it has everything streamlined. I use my paypal and ups accounts - which are streamlined straight into my store. They even have a simple affiliate program already built in. However, I don't think that having a yahoo store really helps my rankings any...