What are people's thoughts on the free version using quickinstall of magento commerce for an ecommerce site starting out? is it easy to upgrade if needed?
Yes, magento is good,but you need to upgrade for more features. you can also try the zeuscart opensource script.
Free Version helps your customer in getting a quick idea about the feature list and later one can upgrade as well as per requirement.
Most businesses will never out grow the community edition of Magento, it is a hugely powerful system. I was unsure what you meant by upgrade, if you mean keep the shopping cart up to date with patches and latest editions here is a easy to follow instructions on how to accomplish that http://www.ecommercegorilla.com/how-to-upgrade-your-magento-installation/
We use Magento in the community edition for a multi store, multi language environment. There are some shortcomings like multi-currency/default-currency but that was the first major issue we had discovered with Magento.
Hello Surminga. Are you talking about edition upgrade? For example, from Community to Enterprise? Then, yes it is simple. If you are talking about upgrade from older version to a newer, for instance, from 1.5 CE to 1.7 CE then it may be quite complicated. In that case you will have to read carefully official guides at Magento site and if you have some errors search for a solution at official forum or elsewhere.
the only issue i have with Magento is that there is no staging environment. You can test on a test site, but changes to the public facing site are real time. Which is a bit scary once your traffic numbers increase.
You should set up a staging site using latest version of Magento CE to make any changes or test modules before uploading files or making changes to your live site. It will save you a lot of frustration.
Its not hard to upgrade , only problem is pretty costly to manage your store once its get traffic and once store need more features However if you want the best Store management Nothing can do better job Than Magento