How would I go about starting a large scale dynamic website

[eclecticbuzzard]

Hi, I want to sell shoes on the internet and I want my website to look similar to zappos.com, grapevinehill.com, or onlineshoes.com where people could click on men's or women's footwear, then select their shoe size and up will pop hundreds of pairs of shoes to select from. I plan to be selling tens of thousands of pairs of shoes per year, and within a few years, hundreds of thousands.

I know nothing of website design or development, and I have neither the time, patience or desire to learn.

What would be the best way to go about setting up the website? Would I need to hire people locally, or are there excellent resources on the internet? Is there a one-stop-shop website firm that could do it all?

Finally, how much do you think it would cost to set up such a website? - ballpark figure for a website that sells a couple hundred pairs of shoes, one pair at a time, per day.

All opinions welcome.

Thanks,
John - Florida

 

[Claes Nilsson]

First of all I'd advice you to not do it. I don't think you'll make up the money you spend.

You will need to go to a webcreation firm and pay for a custom made website, which will be hands down very expensive.
Or you will need to be able to take the time to understand how you install a premade webshop, that you'll likely want to pay for as opposed to downloading a free one.

 

[v2Media]

Waste of time. If you have no patients for web design or development that's ok, but you have to pay someone else to do it, and hire someone to maintain the site. With eCommerce sites, you pay for what you get. Expect a load of cr4p for anything under 5K.

More importantly is the volume of sales you're after. Shoe sales are competitive on the web. You have absolutely zero chance of making 10's of thousands of sales in the first year. You'd have to spend the same amount on site design and development as you would SEO to have a chance of success. Pricing would play a large factor in that. The lowest price would probably the primary sales driver. Can you afford large volume stock purchases to compete with the big guns?

If you've answered 'no problems' to all of the above, I would say you have more money than sense.

 

[GeneticOpera]

Do you have a brick and mortar store that has been successful enough to move on to click and mortar?

That was the question on every test in my E-Commerce course. You can do well online if you have a good market, but think of all the other stores you mentioned. You want a website just like theirs, so why would customers turn to you for their shoe purchases?

Then again, maybe you have the funding, the idea, the supplies, and a great way to market your store to make the sales you want- in which case I say congratulations and good luck and tell me when you open since I'm looking to buy a good pair of knee-high boots. For a help you might try http://www.gsicommerce.com/