Creating a professional website can be challenging. E-commerce web design is really a complex animal. To cut development time, many web hosting companies start offering web hosting templates or hosting with templates.

Whether you're 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 company. 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 templates for e-commerce operations needs a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment processing (here’s a clue, pick Pay Pal). 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. It's up to the webmasters to add shopping cart to the site.

The alternative e-commerce hosting to web templates is e-commerce turnkey solution. EBay Stores, Yahoo! and GoDaddy.com 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, there're many questions to ask:

• 1) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or debit card.
• 2) Whether there's 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 at your web-site.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you'll need to ask questions about:

• 1) what's the basic monthly fee for transactions;
• 2) is there's a setup fee for a new online store;
• 3) how about handling taxes?;
• 4) how much it charges for each transaction.

Talk with your hosting service on e-commerce issues and discuss the best plan to go with.