I'm a little confused as to where shopping carts fit into the scheme of things in building websites. I need to build a site to sell perhaps 100-200 items. When i first started reading about shopping carts, i viewed them as a separate piece of software that would display merchandise, allow for selection of mechandise, handle taxes, shipping, SSL credit card acceptance etc etc. I would build a typical website. Home page, About Us page, FAQ page etc, and if a customer clicked a product category i would link to the shopping cart etc. Some of the posts i have been reading seem to suggest that a person can build an entire website with a shopping cart. Is this true? Can i setup my entire website using something like OScommerce? Is it something you would suggest for a newbie? Or, if i learn HTML fairly well, would i be better off building the non shopping cart type pages myself and then invoke the shopping cart when needed?

osCommerce might have a bit of a learning curve since you're new.

I suggest www.phpmycart - it's all template-based & you can add any page to it that you want.

Viaart - http://www.codetosell.com/ - has a CMS built in, looks qite nice

I'm a little confused as to where shopping carts fit into the scheme of things in building websites. I need to build a site to sell perhaps 100-200 items. When i first started reading about shopping carts, i viewed them as a separate piece of software that would display merchandise, allow for selection of mechandise, handle taxes, shipping, SSL credit card acceptance etc etc. I would build a typical website. Home page, About Us page, FAQ page etc, and if a customer clicked a product category i would link to the shopping cart etc. Some of the posts i have been reading seem to suggest that a person can build an entire website with a shopping cart. Is this true? Can i setup my entire website using something like OScommerce? Is it something you would suggest for a newbie? Or, if i learn HTML fairly well, would i be better off building the non shopping cart type pages myself and then invoke the shopping cart when needed?

To answer some of your questions, yes you can setup your entire website with the shopping cart alone, as I've seen many people do this. Now I haven't used OScommerce but I'm sure there is a way, I had used Zen Cart (very easy to learn) before and you can strictly use that for an entire website. I'm not sure about your last question, but I can say Zen Cart was very easy to learn and you usually won't even have to look at the php code, depending on what you do.