How many products and how do you plan on handling transactions?
PayPal isnt a bad way to get started. You can always ditch them if you reach a certain volume of sales.
For sure - dont spend on “design.” Most of todays big Content Management Systems come with nice themes - that can be customized enough to appear unique.
Two tiers of products, custom and stock. Custom would have four basic styles with at least twenty body colors and nearly unlimited colors for graphics. These would be knitted, not embroidered, heatsealed, silkscreened or sublimated. Stock would ultimately have hundreds of SKUs but less than twenty at present.
I have a design background but just do not have the time to pull all that together and get going in time, I’ve got a pending sale already on custom, a bulk order, and have really not even developed the logo yet. So I need fast, easy and reliable, to get a stable, easy to use and administer site that provides a good customer experience as well.
It’ll be both retail and wholesale, too, so having a protected “portal” type of thing to prevent exposing wholesale prices to retail customers will be necessary.
BigCommerce appears to provide that. AmeriCommerce does, too. Several others that sound as if there would be either an admin nightmare or an execution nightmare. Neither costs more than about $25.00 a month for hosting, shopping cart, merchant account, etcetera unless I’m misunderstanding (and it’s entirely possible that I am, since I’ve never really dealt with the nuts and bolts end of making a site function, I’ve just done the photos, logos, copy, design concepts, that sort of thing).