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Let's get rrrrrrready to rumblllllllllle! All right ECommerce-Guide.com fans, this is what you've been waiting for. You've read the reviews, you've ready the pre-amble in part one about what's important when choosing a hosted e-commerce solution and now you're ready for the payoff. It's time to lay it on the line and see how the leading hosting company based e-commerce solutions stack up, dollars and cents vs. Megabytes and Gigabytes.

The Plans
In the reviews conducted by ECommerce-Guide.com we typically looked at the "best" offering from each vendor. By and large, though, each vendor has at least three different plans, each with its own pricing and features. Disk space and monthly traffic are two of the obvious key differentiators between each level of plans (these are all hosting companies after all). Each increase comes with increased costs.

The higher space/bandwidth plans also tend to offer additional features and functionality to make the higher priced offers even more attractive, such that you may want to go for a higher priced package just for the additional features even though you may not actually need the greater disk space/traffic.

(Editor's Note: ECommerce-Guide.com has not yet reviewed the popular Yahoo's Merchant Solutions, thus is not included here in our comparison. We plan on conducting a full review and including Yahoo's offerings in all future comparisons.)

Both Go Daddy and 1&1 Internet offer the lowest entry point for hosted e-commerce at $9.99 a month (paid on a monthly basis), for 50 MB of disk space. Though the two plans offer the same amount of disk space, GoDaddy limits you to a 20-item catalogue while 1&1 Internet allows for a 50-item catalog. GoDaddy's Economy plan includes easy-to-use, integrated UPS and USPS shipping calculators. 1&1's Business eShop, as tested and reviewed, does not. GoDaddy offers 13 design templates as compared to 1&1 Internet, which has at least 38 design templates.

Mid-tier pricing plans begin at $24.95 with Hostway's Gold plan at 600 MB of disk space. Unfortunately, the superior Miva shopping cart is not included in this level of Hostway plan — you'll have to move up to the Gold Plus plan at $34.95 plan to get that (and a total of 800 MB of disk space).

GoDaddy's mid-tier offering "Deluxe" Quick Shopping comes in at $29.95 and offers 1 GB of hosting space — though you're limited to only a 100 product catalogue. 1&1 Internet's Professional eShop is also priced at $29.99, providing only 300 MB, but it allows for a 200-item catalog.

Interland's mid-tier offer, the Online Marketing Suite is priced at $39.95 and offers 350 MB of disk space, but provides for an unlimited catalog. It does not, however, include the superior Miva shopping cart engine, which you'll have to move up to the next level to get.

The top consumer tier is where the "real" magic happens. Hostway, 1&1 Internet and GoDaddy's all have plans priced at $49.99, though they vary wildly in terms of features and functionality. Interland's Online Catalog Suite at $69.95 is a step above in terms of price and robust marketing features as well.

GoDaddy, as reviewed, offers a solid easy-to-use hosted e-commerce solution, but is severely lacking in the template category.

Both Hostway and Interland offer Miva Merchant as shopping cart options (which I strongly recommend). So, for arguments sake, let's call the shopping cart comparison between those two even. Hostway offers 1.2 GB of disk space, while Interland offers only 350 MB. Interland, however, also includes a Gift Certificate Manager, a Web Coupon Manager, as well as the Constant Contact email marketing program, search engine submission, eBay and Amazon connectors. However, Interland is $20 a month more.

So, Whom Do You Choose?
In each of the ECommerce-Guide.com's reviews of these hosted e-commerce solutions, we found things that we liked and didn't like. In Part 1 of How to Choose, we identified Full Wizard Driven Setup, Choice of Templates, Catalog import/export features, Additional marketing capabilities, Payment, Shipping and Analytics as six key items that a hosted e-commerce solution should have. None of the four solutions that we tested was clearly dominant and not one of the solutions was the best in each of the six categories that we feel to be important.

Interland's top solution offers a strong set of all of these items and we found it offered the best set of additional marketing related features. That said, Hostway's Platinum plan is also an excellent solution. Also, since our initial review, Hostway has dramatically improved its Hostway Merchant Manager application. GoDaddy and 1&1 Internet also both offer solutions that have their respective merits that some users will likely prefer, and at the lower and mid-tier are certainly more attractively priced.

The reality is that each of the hosting companies continually upgrades its feature sets and likely adjusts its plans, storage and pricing as well. So, though we've endeavored to be as accurate as possible as at the point of review, things change and they change fast. So be sure to look at each vendor's site for the most updated info.

Every vendor claims their solution is the best and each solution is easy to use, but that's not necessarily the case for each and every user. What works for one merchant may not necessarily be the right solution for every merchant; everyone has his or her pain points.

The right choice of vendor is really all about what you, the e-commerce merchant, need. Take the advice we offered in Part 1 to heart when demo-ing and evaluating an offer and match that against your storage needs and pricing threshold that we've talked about in this article (and the included chart). It's quite likely that after you do that, the right choice will become clear. If it doesn't (for whatever reason) remember you could always buy a standalone e-commerce shopping cart and host it yourself. Lucky for you, e-commerce-guide.com reviews (non-hosted) shopping cart solutions as well.

Sean Michael Kerner is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.