My partner and I wish to start up an online bookstore but are having difficulty in knowing exactly what to look for in an ecommerce provider. Does anybody know of any links where there are reviews of ecommerce providers or anything similar? It is getting very overwhelming simply searching on the net for them, where we don't really know how good they are. We have tried out some demos/trials but so far not found anything that suits our needs.



The main concern we have is that we want to be able to extract the data feed from our chosen book wholesaler (which we are also sorting out at the moment!) to automate the stock levels within our website. My partner believes that this is something that would be charged as an extra cost to do. Does anybody have any experience with this?



We are very wary of providers who claim to offer 'everything' with one monthly fee etc. As I mentioned, we want to be sure that we are looking for everything that we need to be looking for when we shop around.



I would be grateful for any honest feedback/advice. I have tried to ask for such advice in other business start up websites etc but all I get is adverts from ecommerce providers which can be useful in terms of finding names, but not so much in terms of receiving the real feedback from people who have been there and done it etc.



Thanks in advance