Could you please help me? (sorry if this is a bit off topic) I am not
technically minded, but I would like to start an online store. What
should I start with? Are there any pitfalls that I should be aware
of? Thank you

Well, the first thing you should have planned out is your payment gateway, or how you are going to integrate payment proccessing into the web architecture - who you are going to use, etc.. The reason for this is from there you would have a general idea of the servers (the web host) requirements or what is required on the server (in PHP this is usually the cURL library along with the openssl library which will for sure be available on an ssl enabled server running apache/php).

From there you can start planning out your application and (or) application architecture.

What kind of specific information are you looking for?

Hi,
I think if you buy VPasp shopping cart it will solve lot of your problem.
This is easy customisable software. And they have 60 free payments get way.
check www.vpasp.com

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Cheers,

Ashish
Windows Web hosting with ASP, .NET, CGI, PHP Support