Hosted Ecommerce Solutions:
What is it?
Hosted shopping carts are applications professionally developed to be functionally feature rich, and user friendly. The application is not hosted on your web site, however your web site can connect to it when needed for ecommerce processing.

Strengths:
a) Reliable
b) Require no HTML coding experience
c) Have most features wanted, and good backend store management and reporting

Weaknesses:
a) Expensive
b) Inflexible in design & layout. Generally you cannot "edit" pages, but instead are provided a user friendly control panel where you can control text style, table attributes, and upload a logo image.

Other comments:
Some hosted solutions provide actual credit card settlement services/functions for you (although the price turns out to be higher than having your own merchant account), eliminating the upfront cost of acquiring a merchant account and payment gateway (the bridge between your web site and the merchant bank that actually processes the credit card transactions).

Scripted Shopping Carts:
What is it?
A scripted shopping cart ecommerce solution is one where you install pre-developed code on your web and host & manage the application yourself. You can typically edit the store/cart pages in any HTML editor to match the look and feel of the application (to varying degrees) with the rest of your web site, if you have basic to advanced web development exposure (depending on the cart selected). You are in complete control, and no special installations on the server are required by the web host that should cost money.

Free scripted shopping carts:
If you don't have money to spend, than this is by default solution for you, otherwise choosing a free solution turns out to be more costly in time, frustration, and lost sales, than they are worth. If you have have even a small budget available, there are much better ways to go.

Strengths: Free

Weaknesses:
a) Lacking in features wanted and commonly found in even affordable shopping carts.
b) Subject to malfunction, or open source and requiring advanced coding knowledge to use.
c) Poor support

Other comments: You get what you pay for

Affordable scripted cart solutions: (The solution we recommend & support. See ours here)
This is probably the best solution for those starting an ecommerce web site, and wishing to stay within a reasonable budget and yet still be able to offer a nicely presented store that blends in with their custom designed web site, where you don't have to be a development guru to integrate into your web site.

Strengths:
a) Affordable
b) Good ones offer most features a small store owner would want or need.
c) Some are surprisingly well developed & supported with use forums and email support.
d) Scalable to a degree so that it is awhile before a more advanced solution is necessary.
e) These days, most carts have built in support for PayPal and the larger payment gateway systems used to process credit card transactions online.

Weaknesses:
a) Most affordable carts come with either one or a design few themes to frame cart information which usually will work fine. However for those that wish to fit a cart more into their web site theme and layout at least basic HTML editing experience is desired if not necessary.

Other comments:
For those on a budget, that still need all the basic cart functions and reporting, a good affordable cart solution can't be beat. Note that accept for the PayPal method for accepting payment, accepting major credit cards will require a merchant account through a financial institution and a payment gateway solution which is the bridge between your web site and the merchant bank that processes the transactions.

FrontPage Ecommerce Templates:
FrontPage and other pre-developed themed templates offer a web site/shopping cart solution for those that do not want to be involved in web site design/layout/function or HTML. They only require only basic FrontPage or HTML editor experience and knowledge.

Strengths: Complete, easy to use, fast to deploy, professional designed & developed.

Weaknesses:
a) Very little if any design/layout control.
b) More expensive than affordable scripted carts (for adequate ones in any event).
c) Cart features/options are currently limited.

Other Comments: Paypal is supported generally, however accepting major credit cards will still require purchase of payment gateway, and acquiring a merchant account.