Most of the expensive e-commerce framework packages that I've been investigating recently left me not very happy, but I don't want to lose any more potential orders by neglecting online ordering, and I don't think I'll have the problem licked anytime soon, since I'm still planning to go to San Francisco and Japan over the next few weeks.
There are a few adequate "happy medium" solutions, such as the systems that are offered by Yahoo and bCentral. With the amount of time I have available to invest, they offer just enough functionality to make me feel like it's worth the monthly service fee, giving me some time to implement something more suitable for my needs. Both Yahoo and bCentral are offering the service without a setup fee for now, so I decided to give bCentral a try. So, after all of my headaches, I have a temporary ordering solution for my dragon beard candy and I can probably use it for the ceramics too. The quick templates are a little ugly, but it'll work for now. Since there is a SSL solution already built in, I can accept credit cards, but I'll be doing manual processing for now.
I was wincing a lot when comparing the various off-the-shelf ecommerce frameworks because so many of them seem to have been written with a developer-centric mentality, more focused on what the developer thought was the most elegant implementation rather than on the most streamlined, comfortable user interaction experience. Most of them have clumsy methods for handling different shipping and billing addresses (which is also true for bCentral), and that's not very nice for someone who is selling a lot of items to the gift market.
Although I'm not absolutely thrilled with bCentral's solution, it's a lot less of a commitment at $24.95 a month than the $500-600 solutions that still only get me 80% done. At this rate, I've got 20 months to find or develop a better solution. My only concern is how customers will react to the distraction of being switched to another domain, but I think it won't affect most people. Also, to my knowledge, bCentral doesn't make it easy to handle orders to Canada. It treats the shipping costs as the same, which they are very much not. I think I have a workable solution for this, but it requires some user cooperation.
Anyway, I'll soon see if it makes it easier for people to order or not.