Just wanted to chime in here.. I use ecommercetemplates.com for all my clients ecommerce sites. I have found it to be EXCELLENT and the support community has been incredibly helpful, even when what I was asking to do was very far off base for a normal ecommerce function.
There hasn't really been anything I haven't been able to do with the addition of a reasonably priced mod of which there are plenty to choose from. Its true that in some sense the stores look "cookie cutter" in their functionality, but I have 2 comments about that:
1) There are tried and true techniques that have been found to be effective in ecommerce such as related product suggestions (upsell), list of popluar products, etc. etc. which is why my sites have a similar feel (because I keep buying the same mods because they work so well!)
2) A lot of your look and feel is going to depend on how much time and effort you spend customizing your store's look and adding in mods and features. The people who pretty much use the standard template and don't do any custom design are going to have sites that look very similar to eachother.
Here are 2 examples of sites that I have built using ecommercetemplates:
www.hookmarks.com This one is complete, though I am in the process of upgrading it.
http://www.hautekidture.com/products.php?cat=13 This one I'm still adding products to and the homepage is still "coming soon" but you can get the idea for the layout.
As I said there are similarities between these two carts, but that has more to do with the fact that I'm using the same mods for both (mostly) and the designer is the same (ME!) because if you look at the template I started with,
http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/dw...virtualsilver/you won't recognize it too much.
Having said all that, plan to spend around $100 on mods on top of the template itself. You will at minimum want the image upload mod. Other mods I find indespensible are the froogle mod, the related items mod, the top sales mod and the category headings mod. Still, even with the extra mod $ your talking about a great price. Feel free to ask any specific questions you have, I'd say I'm now an intermediate user at least :)