[bonafizzle8]

I have a really terrific idea for a site, that will involve multi - faceted service geared towards golfers (and on a seperate site, paintball) in the New England region. It will involve everything from booking tee times online to a gear shop to golfing trips around the nation and so much more. The only thing is... I have no idea where to begin. If any of you e - commerce prodigies out there can throw me some bones as to how to get a project like this up and running easily, that would be terrific.

Thanks for your time,
Joe

[mxer210]

First some questions:

1) Do you have any coding experience?
2) Do you have any capital or money to pay programmers/designers to do this all for you?

It really depends on your situation before I, or the community can give you links and information to follow.

[bonafizzle8]

Thank you for responding and I hope the following information gives you enough to form a viable solution for my fledgling idea. For coding... no, I have never had any experience with coding, although I've been actively searching for programming classes that are sometimes offered by local colleges. I do, however, have lots of friends who are quite adept at coding and programming. If and perhaps they would be interested, that would help a lot. As for capital, I do have a decent amount of liquid funds at my disposal, plus whatever I may be able to get for my stocks and I could borrow from friends/family if need be also. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this and reply.


With thanks,
Joe

[mxer210]

So it sounds like you have the money to pay a programmer or use some friends to make your store. The first step is registration. I had to get the following for my store:

Fictitous business statement
sellers permit
Business license

It will be slightly different if you choose a different entity then me (general partnership), such as a LLC or corporation.

The next step is to develop your store. Most stores use a prebuilt shopping cart and customize it to their needs. Some recommendations are Monster Commerce (http://www.monstercommerce.com/) Yahoo Shopping Cart (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/?p=orange) , and OScommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com) and is what I use for my store. Instant E-store is another one (http://www.instantestore.com). I wouuld recommend Monster Shopping cart if you can afford it ($100/month excluding merchant account (optional but recommended) which costs $30-40/month). All 4 mentioned are great shopping carts and you can't really go wrong. OScommerce is open source and can be really hard to develope and work with if you do not have realy good PHP skills. Once you choose a cart, you can have a friend or pay a programmer to customize it and tailor it for your needs for a custom look. It sounds like your shopping cart would need extensive modifications with what you described in your original post. Don't forget to save alot of money for marketing too! There are more things involved in ecommerce, but I'll pos them after you get further along.