What are the risks of running an online store via a bitcoind connection using less than the minimum of 8 connections? I have 1GB of memory to work with on my VPS.

I want to run bitcoind as well as a few other crypto currency daemons.

As it stands, number of connections seem to be the only value I can change that has any impact on my memory usage.

I have bitcoind set to 10 connections at the moment and it is consuming a steady 400MB of memory during this time.

What are the consequences of lowering the number of connections to say 2 or 1?
In theory, only one reliable connection to a trustworthy node is sufficient. If you do decide to limit your connections only to 2 outgoing ones, make sure to connect to nodes you trust to be up to date, to reduce the chance of falling behind, or worse, being the target of an attack.