todd987 Posted July 8, 2003 Share Posted July 8, 2003 Hey guys, Well I'm trying to get a little money on the side for school. Here's what I want to do.... -Setup a website and sell computer hardware/software. like newegg.com -Keep no inventory, while selling merchdise for wholesellers which ship from THEIR warehouses. -Stream line the entire proccess on one machine that does all the work, while spending 10 mins a day updating the site. Is it possible to setup a machine and start an online store executing the entire process of payments to shipping? I've heard of internet treasure chest, but sounds waayy too easy. I want to learn something here people, and I can keep up with advance linux work ;). What do you guys think? Is this possible? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todd987 Posted July 8, 2003 Author Share Posted July 8, 2003 Does anyone know what I need to do this? Thx! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todd987 Posted July 8, 2003 Author Share Posted July 8, 2003 Well so far I got php up and running on apache, moving up! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rothchild Posted July 8, 2003 Share Posted July 8, 2003 He, he... In *theory* your business model is feasible (with the exception of the 10 min/day updating the site comment). The only processes that would not be automated without some custom coding would be determining how much to pay the wholesellers and actually fulfilling the payment to them, (which you would no doubt want to be done in real time!). Best of luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 8, 2003 Share Posted July 8, 2003 -Keep no inventory, while selling merchdise for wholesellers which ship from THEIR warehouses.Before you spend too much time on this, you might want to check what requirements wholesalers have to do this. For example, D&H Distributing (at least used to) offer stores to all its retailers under the rite2u.com banner. I'm not sure of how supportive they'd be with another product. Ingram Micro and Tech Data had programs like this (a shopping cart company actually offers a complete solution for dealing with them for about a $100 a month). Also, you should realize that you will have to get your sales tax ID set up before a distributor will open an account for you. The other question you have to ask yourself is what are you offering? Lowest price? Not likely, large retail operations get better price breaks from their distributors than you will (and better deals on credit card processing). In fact, large internet operations will be able to fit their entire cost of operation into the cost break that they can get (even if it's only a couple percent off or even one). Why would someone buy from you? What's in it for them? Until you can answer that, there's not much point in reinventing the wheel (or Amazon, as the case may be). While you probably could implement procedures to automate this fully (although they are more likely to operate once a day than in real time), you might want to make sure that you get enough orders to justify it. Good luck, Matt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cgchris99 Posted July 8, 2003 Share Posted July 8, 2003 Another thing to consider. A lot of the distributor pricing sucks unless you do a lot of volume. Most of the time, you can buy the same products from newegg cheaper than you can from ingram or d&h I sell computers locally but not on the net. My online store is totally unrelated to the computer industry. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizardsandwars Posted July 8, 2003 Share Posted July 8, 2003 A third thing to consider, is the cost of advertising on the web. No way will a small shop open up and automatically have customers. You'll pay for them for a long while, every single one of them. That means google, overture or whatever. Which mean more maintenience, and some money up front. I'd estimate that $10 per day in advertising would get you about 2 sales per day assuming you have sellable product, and the market isn't oversaturated already. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As of Oct 2006, I'm not as active in this forum as I used to be, but I still work with osC quite a bit. If you have a question about any of my posts here, your best bet is to contact me though either Email or PM in my profile, and I'll be happy to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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