I am looking also. Checkout Interspire & Ecorner. If you looking at serious shopping cart to quickly start & run a business without too much stuffing about with all these so called free OS, I am starting to thing Interspire & Ecorner are value for money.
Magento is a very good program, but it needs a lot of ram and the server should really be optimized to run it. Don't try using it on a $10 a month shared hosting plan.
Magento is not viable, too hungry on resources, you need dedicated host, and I hear you need to have an MBA to know how to code well. Forget it..go with hosted cart solution if your focus is to build and run a business and not spend all your time & money learning how to code to have it work.
You don't need dedicated hosting, and the coding isn't difficult. I have several sites running Magento and did everything myself.
Thanks for the response mjewel. Ok, so it's running on shared host. Can you share the link to your sites so I can have a look at what is possible. Did you have any coding background or any background in OS carts before you used Magento?
You can check out information at magentocommerce.com. They have several partners that offer shared hosting on Magento optimized servers (Elief is one). You of course need a dedicated IP for the SSL. I never post links to my own sites, but http://www.wearport.com/ is running Magento. I know html and have built commerce sites using Interchange - and other sites using Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal. Magento isn't something you can knock out quickly if you have no html background, but I am not a programmer and was able to build several fully customized sites.
i can give you a link of the site, where you can find a big variety of current shopping carts and templates for ecommerce. i think you can find something for your new store. tell you by my experience so if you would have questions - i would be glad to help you here you go http://www.websitetemplates.bz/ecommerce_templates.html
Magento is good - but not too easy to use - and I don't use it any more - I also find a lot of the features held back and only provided in the paid version (very xpensive) I personally prefer prestashop - greate features - and very easy to use..
I use jStore PRO from ijoobi.com and I love it! Magento is weak :/ (very slow) If you have money, then even look into infusionsoft.com
I've seen CS-Cart and Magento both discussed here. Personally I would go with CS-Cart. I've been using CS-Cart for about 3 years and have been very happy. There are a ton of features and the SEO is great. CS-Cart is fairly straight forward to modify to create your own skin. There are actually 40 skins included with the cart so it might not even be something you need to do. I have messed around with Magento quite a few times over the last couple of years. I have built up a couple of stores and thought about using it because it is free. Each time I have tried I ended up just paying for CS-Cart. I had 2 problems with Magento. First it was a pain to modify. It seemed like just wanting to do the simplest modification was a nightmare. So then I would turn to their forums. This wasn't that much help. Sure there are a lot of people on there, but it seemed like I could never get a good answer. I would find posts discussing changing code, but they would never actually say what file to change. Now what good is that? The CS-Cart forums are great. I am on there daily and it seems like most people are clear with their answers and are happy to help. Anyways, I hope my answer helps someone. Brandon