word press happens to be my fav! Thinking of starting a small online store with WP ecommerce theme! Can you please suggest some advice on hosting and payment gateway! Is it mandatory to host the site on a VPS and install SSL! Came acrosee many E commerce CMS , but WP happens to be my fav as i m familiar with! 1. Magneto 2. OXID 3. esales 4. Prestashop 5. osCommerce 6. Digistore 7. OpenCart 8. Freeway 9. Zen Cart 10. Ecommr Spree
Personally, I'm not a fan of the WP ecommerce plugins / themes that I have seen. I would go for another dedicated shopping cart unless you just need to sell a few items on your blog. As for SSL, if your customer enters their credit card information on your website, you need SSL to secure the connection between your customer and the website, and the connection between the website and the payment gateway.
Wordpress as an ecommerce is good - but lot depends on the niche of your site - and what options do you need - because wordpress ecommerce does not comes with very many options as compare to magento - oscommerce etc. hope this helps...
you can always try to get away with the wordpress/shop plugins, but plan on putting in a lot of time on updating and bugfixes. it all depends on your knowledge level, but it seems like the hosted solutions are getting much better these days with options like BigCommerce. just make sure to do as much research as you can with your priorities in mind.. ease of use, customization, theme customization, etc..
If you like to change the way your customer deal with your site. You should go with Magento, it gives merchants the power to create sites that provide an unrivaled and rich online shopping experience. Because it's feature rich and flexible it gives you complete control over the look and functionality of your store.