Best way to set up merchant website?

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So my friend is an entrepreneur and has an idea for a business involving a merchant web-site. With his limited knowledge of computing (could just about master tags like <b></b>) he has asked me to help him put together something. I have some experience with SQL and PHP, but I've never dealt with eCommerce before.

I had a look at PayPal, but it seems that every time you want to create a new "Buy now" button you have to go onto PayPal's site and enter in all the data. I was hoping I could generate them using PHP and SQL; grabbing the current price from a database rather than having to go to PayPal's site and do it all manually. With approximately 200 different items for sale, the manual route isn't going to be a lot of fun!

Also, I could program my own (crude) shopping cart, but I'd have no idea (again) how to interact with payment schemes. Any advice on this part as well would be appreciated!
 
Quick requirements with examples:

Bank - Barclays
Merchant Account - Barclays Merchant Services
Payment Processor - Sage Pay
Hosting/Domain - 1&1
Shopping Cart - cubecart, magento, interspire

There are a lot of configurations. When choosing your shopping cart you probably want to check what payment processors it integrates with. Sage Pay is easily the best in the UK though so I would be looking for an SC that already has it factored in, I wouldn't use Barclay's ePDQ.

You can build your own cart and integration with the payment processor. Most PP providers have tech documentation on integration. Sage Pay's is probably the best if you are looking to build your own. It can be found on their website.
 
If you sign up using SagePay, you can get them to sort a merchant account for you during the signup process.

They also have a really good support line - uk based - that you can call 24/7, this is personally worth a lot imo.
 
Have a look into OpenCart

It's a free eCommerce system that you can have up and running in a few minutes with some limited knowledge.

Once set up its just a case of uploading the products into the database and customizing the look with some CSS/Photoshoping. The support forums are pretty useful so you can edit and remove most features with ease, although having some PHP knowledge definitely helps.
 
Have a look into OpenCart

It's a free eCommerce system that you can have up and running in a few minutes with some limited knowledge.

Once set up its just a case of uploading the products into the database and customizing the look with some CSS/Photoshoping. The support forums are pretty useful so you can edit and remove most features with ease, although having some PHP knowledge definitely helps.

Looks good to me, already integrated with SagePay and PayPal.. no Google checkout but thats a different beast.. still popular though.
 
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