I was hoping to get your thoughts on CMS and ecommerce, what do you use for your clients and what your would recommend.
I know this is a very broad topic so I'll narrow it down a little. My cliental are micro businesses just starting out in this big world wide web so I want to simplify the whole process for them. A lot of the shopping cart options are a bit of over kill for most of my clients and perhaps a bit too overwhelming for a beginner?? I have come across some great very easy to use CMS which are perfect for information only sites or that they can use to edit pages that aren't part of the shopping cart however do you think that's the best option? not only will they need to learn to use the CMS but a separate shopping cart system and paypal (or other merchant). Is there such a thing as a CMS and shopping cart in one??
Thanks for your help, in advance.

In the past I've used x-cart, although that was 3 years ago. I remember it was very easy to customize the look and feel of the site (all templates) and it did have CMS too.

thank you!! I will look into x-cart I've heard it mentioned a few times while searching and sort of passed it over so I'll have a better look. I am about to download and test out storesprite and opencart but I'm sure there will be things that one does better than the other.

The two full-featured CMSes + shopping carts I've used involve the addition of a free extension or module. I suggest either Joomla + VirtueMart or Drupal + UberCart.

Magento Commerce Enterprise also offers a full featured CMS, but at the price of $11k per year. The Community Edition has a poor CMS, but it's free! I use that for most E-Commerce sites these days, because it's a platform for growth.

Thanks for your help, It seems Magento has a massive fan base I don't think it's what I'm after though it just seems a bit heavy and complicated to customise with alot going on in the admin panel. I've looked into Joomla and Drupal and although I would love to use either of the CMS systems I think once my work is done and I hand over the site they may find it a bit of a learning curve, Wordpress looks more suited in the "easy to use" category however it's a blog that's customised into a website (square peg round hole) I THINK I might try something like CushyCMS mixed with a light weight shopping cart depending entirely on the client. I just have to find a few cart options that I can offer them.
I like the look of Storesprite however not sure if people are actually using it, the forums are very quiet? could be that the system is just really easy and no one has any proplems LOL or could just be that it's useless and no one uses it.
I also like opencart, it seems straight forward but I've also read in the last few weeks that there's a few issues re the developer but then again people loove to complain right?
I love the look of lemonstand, (not released yet) could be good for the clients who are ready to try something that you actually pay for LOL Same with Avactis.

I'm using CMS and shopping cart separately. And what are the advantages of using them together?

I guess having them combined means only one admin panel to deal with and only one system that the client has to learn to use. It's all about making things easier as most of my clientelle don't have time to learn complicated systems and are usually just starting out, alot of the time I find it better for the client if I don't give them full control of the site by using something like Cushy there's no FTP or coding so there's no chance of messing things up.