The last five years have been a period of rabid Web e-commerce. Everyone can tell you an apocryphal Internet success story.

Did you hear about the guy who on evenings and weekends set up a site to sell rosary beads? Within six months he quit his day job and working 10 hours a week, he made more money in his first six months than he ever did working his real job. Talk about transcendent success!

Whether such stories are fact or fiction, e-commerce on the Internet is alive, well and accounting for billions of dollars of transactions each year. Forrester Research Inc. predicts that the e-commerce market will account for $64 billion in annual transactions by 2003.

Look no further than your own purchases to know it's true. How many times in the last year have you acquired some product or service online? Compare that with your online purchases over the preceding five years and you begin to get an idea of the breadth and depth of the burgeoning new economy.

If apocryphal stories of e-commerce success make your entrepreneurial juices flow, you're in luck. Today, there are a number of Internet e-commerce vendors and sites to help you in your pursuit of the dream.

Unlike any other time in history, the Web has blown away the barriers between you and setting up your own small retail business. Your search for physical retail space, and your exhausting evenings spent putting together business plans and budgets, are now being replaced by a search for virtual retail space.

Yes, if you were prudent, you would still compile the business plan and budget, but today, many e-commerce setup and hosting services will also help you plan your new business.

If you're already a small or medium-sized business and you want to transition--or at least augment your existing physical storefront with a virtual one--you have the same concerns: How can I get educated in the world of e-commerce? How should I choose a site? Where do I look for resources to assist me? And most important, how much is all of this going to cost?

Entrepreneurs have a multitude of e-commerce resource options. It hasn't taken Internet service providers long to recognize the need and address it with solutions.

Today, a quick search of the standard Internet engines using the term e-commerce will provide you with an excellent starting point for building an Internet presence. Some of the other catchwords you'll uncover include storefront, shopping cart, e-mail account, hosting services, online catalogs, secure sites, banner ads, site statistics, and search engines.

E-commerce is evolving as quickly as it took hold. The days of turning the sale of rosary beads over the Internet into an instant cash cow are gone.

In the Old West, trading posts sprang up around prospect claims within months of the first cry of 'Gold!' Provided the gold held out long enough, trading posts were replaced by stores and saloons and soon a town was born.

But in order for that town to survive the inevitable playing out of the vein, the location on which the town was built had to be sound, and the merchants who built the city had to become imaginative and sophisticated. If the town wasn't to become a ghost, new ways to attract and retain customers had to be found, and local economies had to diversify.

Similarly, e-commerce is no longer as simple as hiring a 19-year-old Web programmer and arranging to take orders online. These days, everyone clamors to be heard, and not only search engines, but other media outlets need to be enlisted to support the development, promotion and marketing of a site.

Consider the number of Internet commercials during this year's Super Bowl and you begin to get an idea of how successful e-commerce involves more than putting up an Internet page.

Contributing Editor Cary Griffith's day job--Web site development--keeps him on his Internet toes.

Some small-to-medium-sized business e-commerce sites

Potential Internet e-tailers should love the number of online resources designed to assist you in your burgeoning business or startup.

We have limited our list of potential resources to only those sites that cater to small or medium-sized businesses, and which also offer hosting services designed to assist you in creating a storefront, online catalog, shopping cart, e-mail accounts, and everything else that hosting an e-commerce site entails.

Do you want a free Web site (up to 35MB), a free e-mail account, free site statistics, and a free storefront? At Bizland.com, you'll find just about everything you need to host and setup your storefront, without spending a dime. You'll receive help in promoting your business and receive a variety of similar kinds of Internet storefront assistance.

Of course, nothing is free, so what's the catch? Advertising and add-on business. If you decide to sign up with Bizland.com, you must agree to show a banner ad at the top of your site.

And if you want more detailed assistance (setting up e-commerce, for example) plan to pay. You'll have to join the Bizland.com community. Nothing on the Internet is free, but depending on your business, Bizland.com could be a very low-cost opportunity.

Cuesta Technologies is one of those excellent places to begin if you want a quick sense of the issues involved with building an e-commerce site. A practical, easy-to-navigate site gives users multiple options to call up information on the "two-click test," searchable catalogs, self-publishing Web sites, forms, shopping carts and other important issues.

For starters, a good place to begin is "10 Tips for a Dynamic E-Commerce Web Site." The first tip? "First impressions count."

Starting at $19.95-per-month hosting fee, .comercis will provide you with everything you need to set up and manage your own e-commerce Web site.

Its low-cost solution involves a template-based Web site plan in which you use a previously designed template for creating and managing your site. The template is fairly limited, creating contact information, product or service information, and enabling you to import your own graphics and add links to your site.

One of .comercis' more interesting features is its eTradeshow, enabling vendors of like products and services to come together in a virtual trade show that never ends. Other Web site plans include more capabilities, and of course, more money.

And if you have sticker shock associated with setting up an e-commerce site, consider leveraging the infrastructure of a major auction site such as eBay or Amazon. It's not just for cashing out collectibles.

Studies show that you can earn up to 40 percent margins with very little up-front costs on this new channel. That's a heck of a lot better than what small businesses are doing with their own storefronts. Better yet, contract with Andale, which facilitates small-business commerce on the major auction sites for a small percentage of the take.

Depending upon the type of business you have, you too can set up your own auction house. Looktrade.com provides Internet users with several standard tools for setting up Web trading places. With applications like LookTrade LiveAuction and LookTrade MarketHub, and with ISP partners like Microsoft, Oracle, OpenSite, and CyberCash, LookTrade wants to do your online trading and Internet commerce.

If you're feeling technically astute, you might want to check out the wares at DellTech. This service caters to small businesses striving to get online.

DellTech offers hosting services, e-commerce and catalog setup services, and a variety of other applications, depending upon your needs. It also sells several different types of software applications for do-it-yourselfers. Some of those applications include Act!2000 (for managing business contacts), BusinessPlanPro (for creating your business plan), and similar software tools.