Dx3webs

lol yes.. great place to start... as it states Magento requires mcrypt php extension yum install php-mcrypt or equivalent for your linux flavour

We have hundreds (and hundreds) of non-techy store owners who manage to make magento work for them perfectly well. God alone knows why anyone would pay to have products added. (My 10 year old uploads her own craft products to her own store) PM me and I will put you in touch with a few friendly store owners who will be happy to share their experiences. Also, ignore any nonsense about needed a VPS.. you just need a shared hosting platform that has been optimised for Magento.. .again as many examples as you like on request. Here is all you need to know to add products : http://dx3webs.com/front/magento-e-commerce/a-beginners-guide-to-magento/

for example http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/webshopapps-customer-group-rate-shipping.html search for "magento postage customer groups" and you will find a few

SSLs drive me around the twist.. this tool here is very useful to see 'is it just me' http://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html

OK.. 25000 is quite a few products. Magento will handle this.. but 25 000 products is 25000 products and you are going to need a fairly decent hosting package. Budget for a high end VPS or a dedicated server. We would steer you to our semi-dedicated magento package if you cant justify a dedicated server. Not to mention plenty of bandwidth for the media files. You can bulk upload downloadable product types. I suspect open cart will manage this on a lot less hardware but you will still need a sound package and plenty of storage / bandwidth.

We standardised on plesk a while ago and have found the new 10.4 a great platform. However, transferring anything between plesk is some what less than reliable.

+1 great developers are easy to come by.. post in the correct place on this forum or try one of the free lancer sites.. it wont cost as much as you might think

Completely disagree.. We used to use other carts but as soon as a store started to do well the owners needed x, then y, then z feature and they ended up on Magento anyway. We have hundreds of magento stores run by non-technical store owners. It runs smoothly on correctly configured hardware and a store owner can be trained to use it with a simple cheat sheet. Yes, you could go with a lighter cart but if your site takes off you will be starting again in a short time. Might as well plan for success.

Magento, open cart, zen cart, prestashop all do this Magento is a bomb proof option and is our tool of choice.

you have refreshed the catalog search index?

Theme forest is very particular about its themes and the authors are generally offer exceptional support.. drop them a line.. if could be controlled by a category ID or it could actually pull out your best selling products.

I don't get this whole magento is too hard to use argument.. we have hundreds of non-techy store owners who manage just fine. magento does not need a vps or varnish just a host who has their server setup correctly and is not greedy.

This can certainly be done but you will have to get a custom extension coded up

+1 mailchimp

you can most of the info you need here http://docs.magentocommerce.com/ http://www.magentocommerce.com/design_guide http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento_user_guide Also, if you’re looking for a good development resource, I highly recommend you get php|architect’s Guide to Programming with Magento. Best bet is to install it and have a play..