We're beginners and need help in choosing which shopping cart will work best Agoracart or osCommerce.  We want to keep costs down initially and were thinking of using the shared ssl and paypal. 

In looking through some of the info, the osCommerce cart does not accept Shared SSL Certificates, but the AgoraCart will. osCommerce accepts PayPal upon install, but Agoracart does not, and there is an additional fee. I was hoping to be able to use both a Shared SSL Certificate and PayPal as the payment gateway, but it looks like neither cart accept both without some additional cost (whether it be the additional cost of a private certificate or the upgrade of the Agoracart to accept PayPal). Am I reading/understanding the information correctly?

Any comments would certainly be appreciated in starting out.
Thank you.

Thank you, fretnmore.  Lunar Pages is our hosting company, and I didn't think that they offered zen-cart as a shopping cart option under their hosting.  I will also look at their forums for further guidance, thank you for suggesting that as well.

Zen-cart is available thru Fantastico - or at least it was a month ago when I installed it on my site.  I'm not into all the root coding of it, but it is putting up .php pages. You can take a look at mine if you want at http://www.triwolf.net/catalog

I wasn't worried about the certificate at this point because I am only using Pay Pal Express Checkout, not the Pay Pal IPN. They are two different entities.  So everything that has to do with a credit card happens at the Pay Pal site.

I hope that helps.