Yes, that is planned (using contracts — see Developer Journal 7 for initial conception). . We don’t know how it will be worked out, but I expect (it has been suggested) that it will involve some of the same direction as you can give your own character when the character stays in world after you log off (OPC task directions or “scripts”). (See Developer Joirnal 3 — again for original conception as it was early on, more than four years ago).

That said, if you own a store and want to adventure, don’t stay away too long because if you do your store could be adversely possessed (claimed and taken over) by someone else. (See DJ 18.)

Yep, its all part of the contract system

For a lot of us, this would be one of the primary purposes of having a family. They'll be good at keeping things running while you're away skilling/hunting/"questing"/whatever.

You could also be part of a traveling caravan, there is a wagon that opens up like a store that lets you sell directly from it.

To answer your question you can hire a NPC or PC(player) to manage your business. If you don't want to hire someone, you can have an alt character run the storefront with an OPC script.

Edit: You can't use the wagon for having kids, just protects you from fatigue.

Not sure how they are going to do hiring because it's supposed to be in the contract system. At one point, the contract system with NPCs was only going to be one-sided as in only NPCs can present contracts to player because there was a worry about NPCs not being able to judge what is fair worth in a contract a PC presents. So in that system if you wanted to hire someone, they would need to have a contract stating they are looking for work and you fill in the details however I believe at some point they said they were looking into a 2-way system where you could make a contract and offer it to different NPCs.

They even talked about maybe having a job board system where NPCs would know they could go there to find work but idk what the update is on whether they are doing that or not.