About Magento community learning curv

I think you will make the right decision to choose Magento CE for your ecommerce site. It does have a little learning curve, but nothing that can't be done through the web admin panel unless you need a lot of customizations. I think most that say it has a high learning curve refers to the template engine and how to customize it. For that you will need a solid understand of PHP and programming principles. If you buy a ready-made template that will not be a problem. You can just upload the template and launch your store. You can change your logo, name address info etc through the admin panel.

If I were to give you a recommentation, it would be to spend a little on a good hosting service for your store. Magento is a resource hog and requires an optimized server. Most shared hosts will not be suitable for Magento (despite they might tell you so) because they are too limited in terms of CPU and RAM usage. If you choose a cheap server you will find that your site is slow. If your site takes more than 2-3 seconds to load visitors will not bother and you lose a lot of sales.

I recommend hosting in the $20-$100/mo range to get good performance.

Upgrading Magento can be a little complicated. Especially in the early days many people were having problems, but this was mainly due to incorrectly configured servers. The upgrade process has become more reliable, but I recommend that you have some knowledge of SSH and PHP/MySQL if you are going to upgrade yourself as there might be things that needs manual work. Most of the Magento hosting companies provide a paid upgrade service, though, if you don't want to risk it yourself.

Finally, I can recommend magespeedtest.com for some real benchmark results from different Magento hosts. This site is more trustworthy than all those "Top 5" review sites you find around, which only lists the hosts that pay the highest affiliate commission.

I hope this helps.

Magento will eat you alive. There are over 12,500 files in the raw system alone and finding how to do mods is hell. If this is your first time with Magento you better bring your sword and mace.