What shopping cart program would you recommend for a total dummy?  I recognize that with any of them I'll need to spend time learning...so I want to spend that time on what is good (reputable) but made for dummys.

Per the fantastico descriptions, cubecart is "easy to use" and zen-cart is "user friendly".  Is one far simpler than the other?

I'm presuming that oscommerce is NOT a beginners shopping cart.  Am I right?

Thanks!

I'm not a shopping cart expert by any means, but I did try using ZenCart on a site hosted by a different company. I had previous experience with a very expensive cart for a site that sold thousands of items, so I wasn't a complete neophyte. I found ZenCart to be extremely complicated to set up and not in the least user-friendly. I finally abandoned it and we've been searching for another cart that actually is simple to set up. I can't recommend a good cart for you to try, but I can recommend that you avoid ZenCart like the plague.

Thanks, all.  I'll avoid zen-cart and try cubecart and Mal's.

osCommerce has just released version 2.3.1, which is a looooooong awaited update with a lot of fixes and a much cleaner CSS-driven layout. The advantage of osC is that it's very flexible; the disadvantage is that it's, uh, very flexible. It's possible to make osC do just about anything, and a huge number of contributions make it usually fairly painless to add function or change the appearance. Even the vanilla version is reasonably straightforward to use, especially if you consult various instructions that people have written.

As with any application, there's a tradeoff. If you want absolute simplicity, so you are led by the hand (or nose) through everything and can't possibly mess it up, then you have very little flexibility in what you can do. It's the "Ve vill tell you vhat you kan do!", "one button installation" school of thought. If you want a fair degree of flexibility, and the ability to do non-standard things, then you have to accept that you're more or less on your own. You will have to add contributions, edit settings, or even write your own code; various combinations of features may not work together smoothly; instructions may not be complete or may be so detailed as to be confusing.

Once you start with a particular store, there's nothing to force you to stay with it forever. You can always scrap what you have and start over if you wish. It's best to run the new store in private and in parallel with the public store, until you are comfortable with the new one, and then cut over to it for public use. That way, you can incrementally ease into harder to use (but more feature rich) stores as you gain experience and confidence. There's no reason to start with a super easy to use store, and stick with it forever, unless it does all you want. The only downside is that if you have a lot of products, it may not be practical to implement a complete "redirection" in your site to map bookmarked and indexed "old store" pages to your new store's pages, and you may temporarily lose some customers and have poorer search engine results. So, feel free to start with a simple "dummy level" store, but don't be afraid to upgrade to something more powerful as time goes by.