tannershmoog

I can use shopify, is that what you would recommend? The goal is just to get something that looks nice and works for minimal cost for the client, and to learn some professionally applicable skills for me.

This is helpful. I guess it makes sense that there is no single answer to edge case handling, and it probably is more than I can handle to set up a payment processor on my own.

As to the career path, I've had a lot of trouble getting my foot in the door anywhere. I have a bit of an employment gap for the last couple years of my university, and while I do have some I.T. and soft development experience this doesnt seem to be enough.

The client is aware that I have no experience and my rate is adjusted according to the risk, even so I dont want to waste their time. That said, would you consider setting up an app with the shopify API to be using SaaS? This would still let me build out some of the front end with react rather than letting squarespace do everything, but from what I understand they handle a lot of the payment edge cases like chargebacks.

Yea the edge cases are what I am referring to when I say I've found it difficult to research. If you know of any resources on this I'd love to read them. I'm not opposed to letting some platforms do some of the work for me, but clicking and dragging on squarespace isnt a marketable skill, so I'd rather avoid that.

The client's requirements are pretty relaxed. Looking at pricing for shopify and stripe, they take the same transaction fees and shopify just adds a 29$/month charge, since the buisness is small enough I assume they would buy the basic plan.

The client is likely fine with either option, what I'm most interested in is getting a working result without getting stuck, while still learning as much as I can from this. I've had a lot of trouble finding a job so I am trying some solo projects to try to get my feet wet in the industry.