Every E-Commerce site needs a shopping cart. E-Commerce platforms evolved from this basic need to provide catalog (product) management and much more. Magento is appealing because it is open source (i.e., free) and it has a strong and (seemingly) growing base. This equates to lots of free and available help via the web. What is also nice is that it is LAMP-based, meaning that it can install and reside on basic hosting packages (i.e., cheap). This is a great combination to keep overhead low to start. I'm using TMDhosting which costs less than $5/mth. It was recommended by a friend and so far I've been happy; I mean, support is only by email (which I was very skeptical of), but the response time has been fantastic so far, so kudos to them for now.
My wife and I spent the weekend in the Admin Console building the catalog. I've actually been quite impressed with the breadth of functionality that Magento offers out-of-the-box. Creating and editing categories and products has been a breeze so far, though tedious, but that's expected. Check out our Beach Towels or our Die-cast Car Collectibles. I hope as I try to learn the front end over the coming days (to customize the look'n'feel of the site) it is as straight forward.
From what I can see, though, Magento is very database intensive. That's a performance concern, but one I don't need to worry about now since I have no traffic. This will be a good problem to have down the road, so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
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