I think Ryan explain it pretty well there. I will add my 2 cents on what he had said.

eCommerce in Malaysia is pretty tricky i would said. There are two type of model. The first model is what we web hoster would prefer where the setup cost of getting you an ecommerce for your business is rather higher than your monthly/yearly cost. eg.

Ecommerce: RM2000
web hosting: RM100
domain: RM35

The next model is targeted for people who do not have much budget on hand which will give you a costing such as this,

Ecommerce Setup: RM500
web hosting: RM700
domain: -

You would have notice that the startup cost is half and usually people will go for the 2nd options because it's a startup and i believe i can change anytime after the first year of hosting. However, the trick is here. The cheaper option do not provide you the option to leave. This makes your business stick to them and you will have to pay a high amount just maintaining your business. Worst, as your online business grows, you uses more resources, they will increase your web hosting cost from RM700 to something i let you imagine yourself. And i do believe you can't do anything about it but to pay since both domain and hosting belongs to them and not you.

This is very normal in the IT world and i heard quite a few customers who faced such problems so just take note of this.

Setting up a eCommerce can really be 1 day if you are alright with the template and move on with the more important parts. However, uploading and data entry might take you more than a week depending on how many items you posses.

Looking at the questions, i'm sure you are a business person more towards a techy person but as a startup i'm sure you can learn and work at the same time and it will definitely save you some cost. Look for someone who can help you out on such matters and i'm sure you will be moving smoothly with your business. (unless you have budget to spare xD)

Cheers,
Clay

1. Majority company will use open source because we are talking about ecommerce so being open means its more developers and security analysis will have a chance to look at it and catch whatever is possible. Some still uses inbuilt system where the ecommerce is built themselves by scratch, in this case, you will have to talk to them to find out whether their source is portable and does the source belongs to you (rarely it is).

For domain and hosting, once you own both of these it means that you are freely about to access the hosting and domain of your own and you can provide these information to others to assist you with transfer. If you don't know anything about these two things. Its as good as giving the services to your provider and knowing nothing about (let alone transfer)

2. Like point 1, it depends on your selection, an open source community provides all these bug fixes and enhancement for you and its free. However, for self customize ecommerce, this is another problem you might want to ask them. For open source, although there won't be much bugs and problems, the "BUG" define here is mostly how you want it to work and your requirement that is not meet in open source coding. Don't think many have the capability to look at ecommerce open source code to help you resolve such bug in a open source ecommerce, rather, they will submit a bug report to you and the bug fixes will depend on the community itself. Lastly, the "design" built for your ecommerce might be where all the bugs you will find gua.

3. Depend on provider. For open source ecommerce, 99% of the tutorial can be found with Google so you really don't have to pay anyone unless they are using a remote access software to teach you on your home screen.

4. Locally, there are 3 options (4 but i don't count the last 1). The 3 options are ipay88, nbepay and paypal. (last options is Maybank if your transaction is big and you can customize your ecommerce directly to their api etc. [troublesome]). Each payment gateway got its good and bad. ipay88 and nbepay is local company which charge you a setup fees and a monthly transaction fess but ipay88 charge more for don't know what reason i haven't had a chance to find out so i mostly recommend nbepay to my clients. Paypal charge a larger per transaction fee but if your transaction is low, i highly recommend you to go for paypal.

5. No more 5. i add myself. i'm sure everyone learn a lot in this post but there are more than meet the eyes. Businesses are smart and i don't think i cover all but this is the business side and all these should be the important part to take note.

hehehe no la. because its open source ecommerce ma. There's isn't any real maintenance to began with other than the web hosting part unless they want you to help them to do many stuff monthly la then its correct to charge a maintenance fee. Unless they want to pay for your attention la you shouldn't reject such offer. WAHAHAHAHA