I'm looking for input/advice on the use of an online store with my website...

The scenario I'm running into is that I am setting up a website for a group of artists, and I moved to webhost4life for the hosting service.  We want the people viewing information about the artists to be able to browse information about them, seamlessly move to a section where they can purchase some of the items online, and then back. 

Unfortunately, the core store module doesn't appear to be ready for this level of activity yet, so I'm looking at investing a bit of money into a third-party program instead.  The general gist of the forum threads I've read so far is that Catalook is most versatile of the bunch, but is difficult to setup (Since I do software installations for a living, that part doesn't bother me.). 

However, I also see that webhost4life offers an online ecommerce ability for a substantially lower price.  My fear with using the canned ecommerce package from webhost4life  is that it will essentially be a seperate website, and thus we will lose the integration features we were looking for. 

Does anyone have any input on this?