This is really a decision that you need to make. It is akin to asking what kind of vehicle you should buy. If I were in your situation what I would do is write out a feature list that I want and find which platform closely integrates with it.

Also, if you are not on a hard deadline play with them all before you make a decision. Then you will know what you are getting into.

No problem, people sharing knowledge is what makes a community great.

To answer your question I missed above, Prestashop is free, all you need it web hosting.

Out of the box I think the supported ones are paypal standard and adaptive, blue pay, authorize.net, cod, bank wire, first data, hipay, moneybookers, payment sense. Those are the US ones I remember off the top of my head, but you can get a module for any gateway really. I made one for NMI I have for free download on my site, there is a stripe one floating around too that is free also.

When clients ask me to use Wordpress for an e-commerce site, I not only say no, I say hell no. Wordpress is not a scalable solution with a myriad of other issues. Let me list the issues I have with Wordpress as an ecommerce store.

Security, it is just not secure. Most ecommerce applications use a two authentication system, not to be confused with a two factor authentication system. Like Prestashop what it does is has a login for the admins and a separate login for the customers. They are not handled by the same code, the same page, or the same system. Wordpress uses only one system, so where an admin would login, so would a client. This is insecure in so many ways in my mind. One, how many password attempts do you wait before you lock someone out? It could be a legitimate user that gets locked out costing you a sale. But at the same time, if you do not lock them out, they can write a script that for days uses different ip addresses to try to crack your admin password. On ecommerce systems most allow you to select an admin directory. Wordpress's is site.com/wp-login. Prestashop or Magento it could be site.com/3490834admin or what ever you feel like using.

Another issue is features. There really are not many, sure there are plugins that are developed by God knows who, but Wordpress was never meant to be an ecommerce platform so it lacks a lot of the valuable features. Most Prestashop sites I work on (I keep using Prestashop not to push it, but it is really the only platform I develop with) only use 2 -4 modules that are not part of the package. Usually they are like an obscure payment gateway, a module that connect to quickbooks, or a shipping module. Stats, products, features, cms, it is all held internally by the application. When it takes 30 modules by 30 different people to make a site, it will be insecure, there are no two ways about it. Something will also conflist as well breaking something. Plus there are not modules for half the features a real ecommerce platform has available for Wordpress. Sure you can sell, can you send time follow emails with coupons? Can you handle shipping products separately from different suppliers? Can you handle warehousing and storing supplier information? Can you import csv files from your suppliers automatically on schedule? It is the things like that when someone opens a shop, they do not take into account. It is a lot easier to flip a switch in the back office of a program to enable a feature than it is to either program it or try to find a module that does it.

The whole idea of Wordpress is insecure when it comes to ecommerce systems. I mentioned the login above, but it is actually the whole foundation of Wordpress. One thing that you will never catch a dedicated ecommerce system doing is executing a server side language in the template. Wordpress's templates are built around PHP with adds another layer of in security. With Prestashop, a template uses variables that are passed from the controller or the module. That way the internal MVC structure is used to execute all of the code. I can only image how upsetting it must be to someone using Wordpress to find out their site was compromised because they downloaded a mailchimp plugin made by coder dude99 and he didn't sanitize the email input. Everything in an ecommerce system is handled through the controller logic, people aren't willy nilly writing code and executing it.

Speed is also an issue, that comes in with the coding quality standards mentioned above. When you are executing all kinds of code, there could be a bottle neck anywhere. Most ecommerce platforms have built in functions for everything code wise and only allow you to use them. Want to access the database? Sure there is a function for that that checks the data for exploits before it is run. One thing I really like about Prestashop that wordpress does not do is how it handles css and javascript. When a module is developed, it has a directory it needs to be in, inside the module. Prestashop then takes the css and js and compiles it into 2 repective files, cutting down your request number and minifying it in the process. Plus it has default support for things such as APC, MEMcache, and CDN servers.

To answer your question above, yes buying a template might be all you need. It really comes down to how you want your business to operate. There is pretty wide payment gateway support standard, but there are some that are not supported. So you might have to buy a payment module.

If you are building this for a client, I would think twice about taking the job, if you don't have any experience with some of this stuff it can be difficult.

Nice, I see you are local to Prestashop's office. Are you a member of the Prestashop forum?

It is pretty easy to maintain, easier than Magento and cheaper as well. It is also more powerful than the other options you mentioned. As for SEO it is on par with everything else SEO wise, it really comes down to how you structure the site, how SEO optimized the template is and things of that nature. There is a hosting company called Cloudways.com you can sign up for a free account with out having to enter a CC and try Prestashop out, they have an auto installer.

Have you considered Prestashop? It is pretty popular also.

Hmm, I honestly do not know in this situation. One thing you might try is to do a modal that blocks the page with a semi transparent layer, but check if it is googlebot accessing the site and not do a modal.

But honestly, I thought it was a cookies thing being in the EU so I am not an expert in this area.

Don't block the site totally and it will not matter really. A lot of people in the e-commerce world do it like in this demo, http://warehouse.iqit-commerce.com/selector/?theme=warehouse2  Just a small bar on the bottom of the page. If you wanted to get even more clever, you could geographically target the user and show based on that and exclude bots from seeing it. But I would not suggest blocking the whole page like an adult site does if it is for cookies. If it is an adult site, that needs a full disabling disclaimer, I have no experience in that area.

I think personally older people do not know too much about them. As far as just plain organic search it should be fine. But at the same time I would poll people you know and ask them if they know about .me domains, or even people you would think that could be visitors to your site.

Apart from the SEO, I think it totally depends on your audience as to whether people even adopt your name. That is one big consideration I would take into account. I think people that are not as familiar with computers are not as aware of the "newer" extensions as young people are. I bought a .me extension for a business it seems to be working out pretty well, but it targets a young audience.

I have not had any issues with my clients. We send the product through with hashes like http://neat42.com/tshirts/1-faded-short-sleeve-tshirts.html#/color-blue and canonical all of the pages without the hash. If you can control the quantty through a url string you will not have any issues.

If all of the domains are not expired you can use the disavow tool as well. That should be your first course in a situation like this, especially when someone is trying to extort you of bad links. If you disavow them, google does not penalize you for them and drops them out of your backlink profile.

I would suggest doing it. I made a module for some of my clients a while back that essentially turned search results into category pages. It worked out very well for them, one thing I did was exact matches redirected to the real categories, because the way the module was written there would be a url collision. One thing I would keep in mind is that the search results should not differ too much from what the category shows. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should have a disallow rule on your search directory and a canonical on your category pages. That should also settle any duplicate content issues as well.

I wouldn't buy that answer either. I don't think they have some secret knowledge, or way of doing things with site structure that would be against best practice yet still work. I think the templates are just made poorly and they are trying to make an excuse that some people will believe.

I would say it is not good practice. I think of the heading system as a structure system. Like a book or an outline. The h1 tag should be the title that encompasses the whole page. The h2 tags are like the chapters, h3 are sub chapters or strong points inside the chapters and so on.

I totally disagree that forum posts are bad. What is the point of SEO? To drive people to your site. Well done forum posts do just that. I post to a lot of forums, so far this month I have around 7k visits to my blog from forums. Maybe they do not hold any "SEO" weight, but the do the exact same thing that SEO does.

The biggest thing I would suggest with forum posting is to not be spammy. Be helpful, write content that is relevant to questions, and post a lot.