In clearer terms, I logged into the ADMIN PORTAL and saw that the items existed. There was also an image for each item in the ADMIN PORTAL.
Strangely, when returning to the website, I am unable to actually "see" the pictures - they are blank. This was not the case back in the testing environment.
Why would this occur only upon publishing the website? Also, when I click cart after adding one of the non-image showing items, I receive an error 500 stating that the cart.html and only the cart.html TemplateDoesNotExist. It has the same settings as every other html page, what makes this single page unique to becoming an error 500?