atp,
Doing it yourself can be expensive, especially once your factor in SSL certificates, merchant charges, bank fees etc.
PhotoMerchant is designed from the ground up for photographers. PhotoMerchant is a subscription based (there is a FREE subscription option) hosting, sales, presentation and marketing tool which allows photographers to get their website online quickly and start selling prints to their customers at their prices.
When you sign up you will be given a website which can be customized by you. You then upload the photos you want to sell. Choose the products you want to sell (print sizes, paper types, other options). You set pricing on these products as well as shipping and tax etc.
Your subscription also gives you complete credit card merchant facilities for Visa, Mastercard, Diners and Amex so your customers can pay instantly online.
At launch, you will be able to charge your customers in either USD, CAD, GBP or AUD which means on their credit card statement your customer doesn't see a conversion fee if their credit card is held in one of these currencies.
Down the track we're planning to add around another 4 currencies. However, the system supports around 170 currencies, however, a conversion will occur. This is done by the customer's bank, not us.
We're currently working like crazy to get the product finished (it's going through testing now) and we're planning to launch in the next few months.
Basically it allows you to be setup with your website with all the e-commerce features you need to customize it to your business.
I'll be starting to release more information on the blog at
http://photomerchant.net over the coming weeks. At this stage we're planning 5 subscription levels. Free, Lite, Amateur, Professional and Enterprise. For most people we suggest you start out with the free subscription to see how you find the product and then upgrade if you outgrow it.
There's a huge list of features and functionality that would take me a much longer post to go into, but if you have any specific questions about what it will offer please feel free to ask me and I'll do my best to answer them.