Shopping Carts and Payment Gateways - which is the best ?

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and I wish everyone all the best in 2003.

I entered a post on the forum a few days ago about shopping carts, merchant account choices etc. I appreciate the help and I have looked into various options, but, what I need seems to be only offered by a few suppliers.

Moving right along, before I throw my PC out the window, I thought I would ask a slightly different question. A tough one, yes. Important for everyone reading - yes, eventually, if you have your own store, or are just selling several items at a website, on the net.

I used to use Clickbank and Pay Pal for digital sales, but, now, as of January 2, I will be launching a very large golf store at my Golf Revelations site (looks soon to change greatly), where I'll be selling golf equipment and golf ebooks. Obviously, I have a large number of items to enter into my Shopping Cart. I have the golf info. to enter, and a very good knowledge of HTML, it's just building everything using Shopping Cart software and making sure that my merchant account allows the cart, that's the dilemma. I signed up with Pay Systems a month ago and they use a shopping cart from http://www.quickpaypro.com . Their website is excellent and the potential of the software looks like all a person could ask for, but, I'm finding the actual "doing" part hard. It must just be me, I know.

I have also checked out 2 other big suppliers of carts, namely, http://www.1shoppingcart.com and http://www.shoppingcartsplus.com . They also look excellent, but, they require a different payment gateway, other than Pay Systems etc.

My question : Has anyone used any of these shopping carts to build a store online ? If yes, did you use Wordpay, or Paypal, or Verisign, or another compatible gateway to accepting credit cards (with the Shopping Cart), and how user friendly was the process ?

I need to get my site up and running by January 2, if at all possible, so that other advertising plans are not hampered. However, I can't play around trying to get something to work, if I need a PHD first. No, I'm not negative, I'm just stating a fact.

Your expert opinions are appreciated. Thanks very much.

P.S. If you know of anyone I could hire to do this work (if I lose it in the next few days), please let me know.