Is it worth the costs of maintaining your own website for a small seller?

Cost for web hosting, cost for SSL hosting, cost for merchant account. Is it worth the hassle for a small time seller? ($500 a month)

There are alternatives out there like Amazon webstore that is only $25 a month plus 5-6% processing fees, and there are no liabilities everything is done and you can begin listing right away. I have to ask how can you beat that for a small seller?

The attraction to owning your own site is that it costs less, but does it really? If I skimp out and get the cheapest possible web hosting and the cheapest SSL certificate and the cheapest merchant account. Can I really beat $25 a month + 5-6% processing?

Don't get me wrong I really want to create my own site with zen-cart but i'm trying to justify the expense, or possibly discover a cheaper solution. The SSL really gets me, some are $10 a year, others are $300 a year. Which do you really need?

Thank you for reading and possibly help me make a decision for a small time seller.

Yes. My host charges $3.99 a month for a basic hosting plan that will more than serve for a site doing the business you mentioned. There is no practical difference between the $10 and the $300 SSL certs, so let's get the cheap one. There is no monthly charge for Paypal Express, and you're going to pay the percentage anywhere. So, $58 a year +3-4% of sales and you're in business with an ecommerce website that you control start to finish, and you don't have to select from a limited number of 'looks' (as you do with Amazon).

I also think that you're limiting yourself when you say your site will only ever do $500 a month. The idea is to start small and build the business as you go. That's the beauty of open source free software. Cost of entry is minimal and your growth potential is only limited by how hard you want to work. There's a Zenner who showed up well after I started posting here whose site is now doing over a million dollars in sales a year.

You make very good points. I also learned about Stripe for payment processing, this does not have a monthly fee. I guess today I will focus on finding a cheap provider.

I will focus on finding a cheap provider
I would not skimp here - - many "cheap" hosting providers are that because they overload their servers causing a Db driven script to load soo slowly that your customers click away before they actually see your offerings

Whats considered cheap? To me under $5. $10 maxing out for me lol

Whats considered cheap? To me under $5. $10 maxing out for me
$5 is bottom and mostly "cheap" hosting that might not provide you with the response desired
$10 is doable or maybe just a bit less

You have to approach this as stevesh pointed out