Back in the day, I set up my first external store the "pure" way, coding pages with HTML and uploading them to my domain. I added an electronic shopping cart, set up a merchant account... I'm getting tired just remembering it all! But you don't have to go through all this. There are a number of reasonable options for you to roll out your own storefront, independent of the PODs, without too much time or hassle. I'm talking about Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, or vStore.
You can set up a store using Yahoo's storefront program for about $40/month, plus a fee of 1.5% of your sales. The benefits of a Yahoo storefront is that your store will look clean and professional. Yahoo gives lots of great tools, like a coupon creator. To learn more about opening a Yahoo-hosted storefront, go to Yahoo's small business section and look into the Merchant Starter plan.
Another option is an Amazon store. In this case the program is called Amazon Pro Merchant. Again, the fee is $40/month, but Amazon will take a bigger cut of your sales - 15%, in most cases. An Amazon-hosted storefront is a good idea if most of your potential customers are also the kind of customers who buy lots of books and other media on Amazon.
But what if most of the potential customers for your designs/sayings are bargain hunters looking for obscure items? Then an eBay store might be the way to go. Fees start at $16/month plus $0.20/month for each product you list for sale (whether it sells or not.) eBay traffic has been on the decline lately, though. Statistics show that eBay had 9% fewer shoppers in 2009 compared to 2008.
Finally, vStore. The only one that is totally free. The thing is, vStore-hosted storefronts all have that certain look to them. See an example at http://www.vstore.ca/featured_store.php. If you don't mind the look and feel, and if you're already pretty savvy about e-commerce (vStore support is fairly dependent on you handling things yourself), then check them out at http://www.vstore.ca/.
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