Fantastic(o)?
E-commerce has never been easier. There are many cheap and even free e-commerce packages (such as the dreadful OSCommerce and its many forks, Magento - the new darling of free e-commerce, and CubeCart), hosted solutions such as EKM Powershop and even the major hosting players sell bundled e-commerce solutions cheaply. The entry point has become extremely low.
Having such as low entry means anyone with a net connection and perhaps a fiver a month can set up an e-commerce site. Indeed, many hosting packages now come complete with a one-click installer called Fantastico, which enables a handful of e-commerce applications to be installed easily. Sounds great? It's not.
Aside from choices being too easy to make (one-click installations and a play-around hardly constitutes the sort of research someone serious about online retailing should take; one should at the very least create a written brief, even if only to be used internally, and then look at the various solutions both free and paid, off-the-shelf and bespoke to fit around their requirements), versions are very often out of date on Fantastico packages.
Risking your entire reputation and fledgling business on a potentially insecure shopping cart just because you don't have the technical know-how of how to install and secure a shopping cart script or willingness to pay somebody who does have it is foolhardy.
If you can't figure out how to install a cart, especially given the simple setup scripts and instructions most have, you've no place running an online store. There's a helluva lot more to setting up a secure shopping cart than a one-click-install and uploading a skin.
For hobbyists looking to test the waters of e-commerce, they shouldn't be looking into setting up their own application. They should use a hosted service (EKM, etc) or even Ebay or Amazon's marketplace and let them worry about security, backups etc. Lack of knowledge (technical, business, legal) is a disaster waiting to happen.
