I had posted this elsewhere and realized it was in the wrong place. I will rephrase my query here and make it a little more pointed and in context.

I am just getting to the tail end of building my site. It is a photography site and I have no idea if I will have a little traffic or a lot. Whichever it is I want to sell at least a few of my photographs. No grandiose ideas here, just a bit of income if possible. I know there are many ways of generating income on a site from retail to Google ads. I am not sure which rates as the more ingenious or practical way of doing this.

What I want to offer is my photos in 2 or 3 different sizes and a few variables in quality. The differences in quality being standard print paper through acid free archival paper. Size range from 5x7 to 11x14 prints. (Larger would be custom order)

What knowledge I have of shopping cart systems and gateways is PayPal, which I am very familiar with as a buyer, and a few others such as the one offered here at LP. Never having used a shopping cart system before and being very new to being a webmaster I am looking for people that can give me advice who are familiar with the selling of mercandise that is similar in sales structure to what I have stated above.

The other factor is that I am using Joomla for my site and know of the existance Virtue Mart but am not familiar with any part of it. I don't know how complicated it is to use another shopping cart system in conjunction with Joomla and maintainance would be a knowledge issue as I am new to most of this programming and fuddling my way through all of this as of this time.

So, any help would be greatly appreciated as I have found that there is not a lot of hot air here at LP, just good, dependable advice.

That is what I had in mind and thanks for the response. What I am not sure of is whether or not I can use a cart system in conjunction with paypal. From a business perspective, I am not sure of internet sales. I have been in business for 25 years and am only now getting into the internet side to expand my sales. So, the internet side is brand new to me and I am looking for a good way to do this as I am commited to making this work.

I'd suggest looking around more.  Don't limit yourself to the 3 options within Fantastico.  Look at the forums for each option and see what kinds of problems people are encountering.  And, are people responding to the problems with actual solutions?

Also, try demos of what's available if you can.  This will give you an idea of how easy they are to work with.


Using Joomla - Virtuemart here (after being disatisfied with osCommerce)

www.usasportstraining.com