Ok guys and gals,

I've got a question on a concept for a commerce store that sells hard goods with limited amount of inventory selection ( like 5 categories with a few items in each) but with a lot of each like 50+ of each item.  What I would like to know is what kind of components or extensions (is that right?) are MUST HAVES in a store like this(and we're talking about budget here  )? 

Also what would be a good way to showcase these items (design-wise) since I'm working with a little over a dozen items.  I was thinking of having your standard menu on the left side, then in the main body area i'd have thumbnails of the items with each category separated by some type of bar or mini-header, similar to buy.com but much much simpler.

Virtuemart is not ugly
Its pretty powerful and if you know what you are doing you can make it fit your website design easily

Default store is ugly. It's only there to get it working. You need to customize it o make it look good and fit into your site.

My only problem is I have no artistic ability (which is why I joined RT in the first place) and every time I try to customize it I make it worse. If you cruise the VM forums, many people contribute things that do make it better.

I've actually demo'd the features of virtuemart and they don't seem at all that bad.  I was dreading when I heard the word 'ugly' and would be extremely disappointed. 

I was also looking at oscommerce as well. 

I don't need anything fancy, just something simple and clean.  I mean there are bigger things to worry about with a commerce site than how artistic your cart looks. 

I also saw a service site for commerce functions for 650$ which is a bit high if you ask me so I'll try out the free resources.  It's just that I always follow the saying "you get what you pay for" and am worried with those solutions.  Then again joomla is free...

So any thoughts on design or no?

I have done many sites with oscommerce and i like that. But virtuemart are more simple at start from.
That people some not can any php-programmering have many problems with oscommerce.

PS. What template from RT are optimiced for virtuemart?

Maybe can RT make template for -commerce with virtuemart a month

Rockettheme will start releasing theme packs for Virtuemart after the new version(of VM) is released. I hear that VM are waiting for Joomla 1.5 stable to be released so it could be a few months away.

Which is few months away, release of VM 1.1 or Joomla 1.5, VM 1.1 have no clue but the way Joomla 1.5 progresses I won't be surprise if it goes into next year.

As of today June 20, 2007 latest stable version of VirtueMart is 1.0.11-HotFix. The next major version of VM is version 1.1 which will support templating but that version is still in beta.