HTML is easy, but creating a professional website is beyond the average Joe. When it comes to a e-commerce website, the design is even more complex - logo, navigation, color themes, text arrangement and content creation. Website creation has been made easy with web templates. To increase client base, many leading web hosting companies start offering web hosting templates or hosting with templates.

Whether youre looking for a simple web site or a functional e-commerce website, the chances are that you may be able to find a few web templates from your hosting companies. A simple web template may cost under $20 dollars, but a well-designed professional e-commerce website will cost a few hundreds or more if not thousands. The cost of web templates is still cheap comparing to custom-made e-commerce websites when Web designers charge anywhere from $20 to $100 per hour.

Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web hosting for e-commerce operation needs a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment processing. Web templates for e-commerce often include common pages and navigations for online shopping - searching or browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making payment. The web templates for e-commerce do not include or connect to any specific shopping cart. Its up to the webmasters to add shopping cart (paypal or 2checkout) to the site, which is often the copy-and-paste of a few lines of HTML code.

The alternative to web templates is e-commerce turnkey solution. EBay Stores, Yahoo! Store and Microsoft bCentral are the most popular turn-key e-commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily. Different hosting plans may have different free structures. The cost of each hosting plan often varies on transaction volume.

When comparing functionality, therere many questions to ask: 1) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or eCheck beside support on online credit card and paypal for payment options; 2) whether theres a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed successfully.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, youll need to ask questions about 1) whats the basic monthly subscription fee; 2) whether theres a setup fee for a new online store; 3) whether you have to pay for the addition of new items to the product catalog; 4) how much it charges for each transaction. High volume sites may prefer the plans that charge a higher monthly-fee but a lower fee on each transaction, while low volume sites work better with hosting plans that charge zero or low monthly fee and initial setup fees but a slightly higher fee on each transaction.