New E-commerce site

I am hiring a web firm to design and build me an e-commerce site
for retail products. What questions should I ask when I interview them?
What are the red flags I need to look for? Any insight would be greatly
appreciated!!! Alli

E-commerce sites are pretty straight forward.

The only things you'll need to decide are where you're getting your merchant account, what gateway, what cart and what type of design you're going to use.

The company in my sig creates unique, open source carts for each e-commerce site.

Hi Alli,
You should find out if you'll be able to make changes yourself to the site, and find out how to do it. If you want to change the look a bit, add/delete products, you don't want to be in a situation where you'll have to pay them for everything. Hope this helps.

Faith

Find out which shopping cart software they recommend, and why. Judge the software by it's flexibility, scalability, ease of management. Find out about their hosting. Are the servers secure? What about the code? Do they use best practices when coding?