I am testing woocommerce & wp-ecommerce for an upcoming project. wp-ecom as well has paid plugins. the first thing I wanted to do, display the items in a grid, requires the gold cart plugin which is if I remember correctly, $40.
Out of the box, woocommerce is appering the do everything we need including a grid display on the front page and tags / category pages. we are listing images, and people are going to buy prints, so I had to learn how to create a variable product to allow for frame choice. I was able to figure this out without any tutorials in just a few minutes. we only need per order shipping, so the only paid plugins I was looking at were the checkout and potentially the other paypal one.
It seems that any cart will require a few plugins or customizations. This is planned in the startup cost of the store, thus we are just trying to have a clear picture of what costs are there before making a decision. the prices are pretty fair, so its not really a huge deal to us, its more about functionality.
right now, i am looking at more of the order processing / management aspect of it. it seems woo is slightly more smoothly integrated into the wp dashboard. given I am handing this off to some very non-techie people, I am thinking that this might be a real strong case to go with the woocommerce plugin.
I see mention of various themes in this thread.. I am wondering if there is any issues starting from the twenty-eleven default theme and going from there?