I'm fairly new when it comes to FREELANCE web development and I have a couple small scale ecommerce projects in the pipeline.
Can anyone suggest any good starting points for understanding some of the basic ideas of what is involved with ecommerce sites (i.e. merchant accounts vs. shopping carts vs. paypal, etc...)? I am especially interested in anything that is cheap, open source, standards compliant, can be updated by the client, and is designed for small businesses/artist, etc...
i am leaning towards Big Cartel (http://bigcartel.com/home) for my first project. Anything similar to this out there?
Look at Startlogic: $5.95/mo and you get your choice of shopping carts. I don't think there is any limit on how many items you can sell or how many pictures you can have per item...look into it, anyway.