[hijinxx]

Hi guys,

Wow I'm finding alot of good resources on this site already! I'm a young professional engineer who had switched over to the practice of podiatry. Currently I am still in my 2nd year and want to start an e-commerce based site selling specialty footcare products and shoes for my patients and others with foot management problems.

Now, as a student I don't have too much to invest. I've read up on osCommerce and ZenCart as places to get started. As my web skills are limited, I guess I will attempt to create the site myself before going to a professional for things like Search Engine Optimization and such (anyone here with expert experience want to help me take on my project for about $1000? - please PM me)

However, I do have a couple of specific questions and any advice would be welcome

1) How would I handle the inventory portion of my business? I hardly have the startup capital to invest in purchasing a ton of shoes and footcare products let alone the money for office space/warehouse space to store it. How about drop shipping? There are several dozens of footcare product manufacturers out there I would like on my site and I am not sure if any of them would do drop shipping. How does one start with startup stock without the capital to invest yet!

2) Customer service - Many successful e-commerce sites have comprehensive M-F/9-5 customer service employees on the phone in the case where a buyer encounters difficulty on the website. Again, I do not have the startup capital to invest in this as of yet and so how does one handle customer service inquiries? Should I just handle it all myself through email and give each email a 24hr turnaround time?

Thanks!
Mark

[gofrugal]

Good plan. Send you PM

[jimpossible2k]

In my opinion, the best way to find a software developer for your project is to visit a website like www dot mysoftwareproject dot net (sorry, forums will not let me use links) and post a description of your project. Within a few days, software developers will have placed advertisements / cost estimations for your project. Then all you have to do is choose the developer that you think best suits your project and contact them via phone or e-mail.

Hope this information helped. I know it helped me a lot when I was looking for a developer!

James

[FormPay]

Seems to me your only problem would be finding a proper dropshipper. If the manufactureres will dropship for you then you will have it much easier.

Heres what you will need:
- Domain and webhosting (of course)
- FEIN # (Free)
- Sales Tax Certificate (Free)
- Shopping cart solution (i highly recommend volusion but you can go with free carts as well)
- Advertising capitol (this can be as little as $10 per day)
- merchant account to accept credit cards (i highly recommend Charge.com)

Once you have these things up and running you can begin applying to become a retailer. I highly recommend you do not go directly through dropship companies, they take about 70% of the profit you would make. You will find a lot of manufactures will dropship for you without the large fee.

I would highly recommend having around $2,500 min. to startup this site.