Ecommerce shopping carts for specialty store

I'd try bigcommerce for something like this, should serve you well

Are you drop shipping your products?

I just got a newsletter from Big commerce and their new themes would be a good fit for what you want to do ,plus they have dropshipping origins to calculate shipping,, the only thing I don't like is their new 1% revenue share on their least expensive plan.. 3dcart is another good one and ... americommerce No Affilation

Almost any modern cart can run that kind of site. The area that will be tricky is if you want to automate the drop shipping. Not all carts can do that so you will want to consider that in your decision.

Magento (and probably others) can do drop ship automation with special extensions.

As others have said, Shopify or BigCommerce if you're starting out. Then, move to a custom platform as you scale - either proprietary or open-source.

If you want to get up and running without monthly fees, I'd go with Woocommerce. It's the ecommerce solution I use. Has a lot of extensions to do just about anything you want to do.

Make sure to consider marketing in the local business mags for your area. Maybe if you live in California than market in the business section of the newpapers and mags.

I found Shopify to be the easiest to use and the most affordable.

Based on what you are doing and the sites you have shown me, most of the answers here are off base. So just to give you information, the site you showed as an example, is an ASP based site so most likely built with NOP Commerce. I have not used it since I don't want to pay for the higher licensing of ASP and Microsoft hosting but it is a good place to start.

That being said, you can do the same things with either Opencart, Prestashop or Magento. As much as I like BigCommerce and Shopify it is missing some functionality you will need in your cart given the office supplies you are selling. You need a cart with strong attributes tags so you can provide search functionality to say, I have a HP XYA 1 Printer (made up), what toner cartridges are compatible. It is missing in Shopify and BigCommerce. Wordpress won't work in this case either.

Your best bet in this case is to get some inexpensive hosting, install a few carts and play around with it. Once you have a feel (you will need to get a feel for it) then you can outsource the nitty gritty that you need (including better hosting). You should also check out Americommerce as I believe it has that functionality built in as well. They have a free trial.

Bigcommerce would be a great choice for you. They've got a ton of great themes, many of which are responsive right out of the box. This is huge for giving your audience as much access to your store as they could possibly want, and also helps out with SEO in a pretty big way, to boot.

They're partnered with us here at Solid Commerce, so we can happily set you up with the online store that you're looking for -- we can also help you out with warehouse management.

If you're using multiple drop shippers, we can help you out with automating the order import & export. Sometimes file formats can get pretty complex, so we can help you simplify and automate that process.

You can check out a bit more info and download our ebook here: Automated Order File Import & Export (Beta Preview) | Solid CommerceSolid Commerce

Shoot me PM if you want to chat a bit further about anything specific. Hope this helps!

Since you are drop shipping all of your products then you need to look at a platform that supports drop shipping. That removes Shopify and Bigcommerce from the list since both of these platforms require installing a third party application that will cost you an additional monthly payment on top of the standard monthly fee + rev share.

Have you taken a look at one of the self-hosted options out there? Magento?

I can help you to replicate the design you are seeking, or even to better it! PM me and you can take a peek at me previous portfolio.