Holiday home booking system ?

I am a complete beginner to e-commerce but have been asked to build a web site for someone that wants to rent out a villa in spain. Consequently I need to offer a very simple booking system and then the ability for a payment to be made.

Rather than reinventing the wheel I was hoping there might be some free (I'm building the site for free) basic software I could modify to do the job. Is this something that Zen Cart could be used for or would I be better looking elsewhere?

Thanks for any general help or advice.

p.s would also welcome any advice on the best way of dealing with the whole payment side of things .. for such a low throughput kind of undertaking what would be the best merchant/gateway to use?

Ian

While I am positive that zencart could be setup for this, it seems a bit overkill for a single item as is the case that you described.

I do not know how universally accepted PayPal is but one can accept credit cards and a PayPal payment using an account setup with them. And for the relatively low volume of payments that will be processed they might be the most economical.

Hi. I am attempting to do the same thing. Because I know so little, I still have faith that I can eventually achieve it. Here is where I am up to: www.cottagemaldon.com . The main problem that I am aware of is that a shopper can put the same night into their cart twice (which doesn't make sense in this application). So, my first question is: When the shopper cliks on "buy now", I want the product to be removed from the product list right then. (at the moment, it gets removed after they pay).

Joomla might be worth evaluating as well. https://www.joomla.com

Good luck,
Scott

I don't know what this site costs, but I know some property managers that use it and are very pleased with it: http://www.superinn.com/

Thanks to swguy and styledata for the suggestions, and I will certainly follow them up. I had a quick look at Joomla! and the add-on Jomres. This could be good for another site that I am developing, that allows bookings to be made at multiple accommodations.

For Blue Wren Cottage, however, I am still keen to stick with what I have started www.cottagemaldon.com because I feel that it is "almost there". It is currently "live", and it has already made one booking.