As you, I have been exploring the wide and diverse offerings to establish an e commerce website. My goal, is as usual for me, to do it right the first time, and not look back with regret.

I like to buy the best I can, and rest assured that I got what I wanted, and I knew what I was asking for.... kind of like shopping at symms, where "the educated consumer is our best customer"

I can feel your pain in what you have experienced with the offerings that are available to us, each claiming that they are somehow better than the rest... yet, each offering what sounds to be like a political speech, rather than a specific solution to a very simple problem.

So how do I go about building a very simple, easy to do it yourself, ecomm site, that will be seo optimized, ranked by Google, related in spider searches of similar products, have a shopping cart with simple and secure checkout, accepts all major credit cards and paypal, is user friendly for the client, as well as a novice administrator, will allow for direct sales, and or drop ship from a multitude of suppliers, is quick books friendly, will support multiple forms of flash, quicklime, is web 2.0 capable, and most importantly, is a reasonable cost?

here is what I have determined.....

1- I have signed up with prostores, and become a reseller of theirs, requiring that I pay them a 300/month fee, and then purchase a server which I am in the midst of doing as we speak. the demands are that the linux based machine be set up in an isp (thank goodness my buddy owns access highway here in slip ny) and once running an older version of redhat, they will upload the prostores master license into it which will allow me to resell prostores to other end users.. this being my biz plan, reselling websites.

2- I have contacted and gone all the way down the path with 1 and 1, only to learn after hours of communications, that they are ill prepared to offer a reseller type relationship with anyone, and merely wan to host sites on their own, for themselves. they have no plans to date e to have any form of reseller agreement.

3- I have been through godaddy.com and seen that although they do seem to have some kind of basic plan, I feel that they may have sank too many dollars into superbowl adds, all the while saving costs on the clothing for their spokesgerl...
i am afraid to go that route since I am not certain that they are here for the long haul. just imagine attempting to recover your site once they declare chap 11???

4- I came across another reseller host opportunity from a company called volusion, and while they do offer a reseller opportunity, it seems that you are somewhat restricted to making only up to 20% on any of their products.
currently I await their return email to learn more

5- I have investigated network solutions as an alternative, yet I cant obtain any info as to the existence of a reseller opportunity that is viable with them.

6- I have gone through yahoo stores, gmail stores etc, and a few others, like kurant- which was the original prostores program, & Hostopia, only to land back in the same place... that being nowhere.

while it seems that prostores has the best to offer, and perhaps the MOST credibility, as they are 25% owned by ebay, and they don't really care what you make when reselling their product, its apparent, as you have pointed out, that prostores is a bit less than responsive???? almost like they are preoccupied with something else????

having invested thousands into this project, and have no less than 5 other customers already pre-sold on the idea of point, click, and you have your own self constructed, self managed website, I am desperately seeking a real option.

PLEASE, keep me advised as to what you come up with, and I will most certainly do the same.