I just got an invitation to check out a sneak preview of Shopify, a hosted service that plans to make setting up an online store dead simple for the 99% of the world population that doesn’t know how to set up a gateway or a secure server. Shopify takes the complexity out of e-commerce by offering a sleek and intuitive interface to build and manage your online store. Startup costs are gone too. Signup is free and the only money you pay to Shopify is a modest 3.75% on all sales. The obvious upside being that if you don’t sell anything, you don’t pay a cent to have the store up and running.

You can check out the sample store I set up for Mustaches for Kids. I think you’ll agree that it’s a stacherrrific execution. I set my store up to send funds directly to my PayPal account – no merchant account required, but they do support it if you do have one.

If Shopify takes off it’ll be a fantastic way for bands, artists, artisans, small businesses and filmmakers to sell their wares online. For something as ubiquitous as e-commerce, it’s been too expensive for regular people to get into for too long – hopefully Shopify can change that the same way Blogger and LiveUpdate did for personal websites a few years ago.