Erik,
I am using wordpress for my tshirt company and just basically iframing the store provided by the company that makes our shirts in the store page on our site using wordpress. did that make sense?
At any rate, I am very new to html and css, but wordpress is definitely a great site builder.
I just use Firebug in Firefox to make all the page changes, and then if it works and i like it I go into appearance and edit the css in my theme.
They also have ecommerce plugins and themes geared towards that kind of stuff w/ shops already built in w/ shopping carts etc. I think its a good choice.