Through my career as webmaster, ten of people been asking me help to setup their ecommerce online store. For a technical people like me, and many others webmaster, setup ecommerce store is not hard, and probably took 1 or two hours to complete.
If you are a beginner, then this will be a good guide:
1. find hosting plan that have ecommerce shopping cart, eg. Oscommerce, zen cart. These shopping cart are come with fantastico. Hosting that offering this are: hostgator for example.
2. login to cpanel control panel. Under ecommerce section, you will see few shopping cart available. Select oscommerce. Installer will start. Follow installation tutorial from:
http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/...stallation.htm
3. Basically you need to setup: oscommerce, access right, mysql database, and upload products to complete your online store.
Good luck and happy learning!