This message is more geared to link builders who have worked with building links for ecommerce companies - I am just a one-person shop with a limited budget set aside for link building. For me to compete effectively with my competitors, I estimate that I would need to have somewhere around 15,000 to 25,000 backlinks for one of the sites I'm considering developing. To me, this is a heck of a number of backlinks considering the other sites I was involved in only required 1,000 links to get a good ranking. In doing a check on our competition, the sites were launched about a year ago and the links are mainly one-way links coming from PR0s to PR2s links (some of them are repeats from the same link domain also). I am just bewildered on how a site can accumulate this many links in just a short period of time. Assuming my goal is to catch-up with our competition in a 6-12 month period, is there a ballpark estimate on link building of this magnitude?? Are we talking $5,000 or $30,000? I know there is a huge disparity with services offered by link builders (quality of links, type of linking, etc...) but I'm just trying to get a feel on what I am up against before I go any further...
It really depends on how good your site is. If it can be made into the sort of site that can naturally attract links by link baiting then you can get much better links and not pay as much. Expect to pay for the initial link baiting service though. To start with you need to go and buy some quality links from relevant sites. Then buy your way into the top directories. After a couple of months pay to get your site in 1000 directories. You should also submit a couple of articles per week. The key to success for an ecommerce site is link bait though. Most will fail because they don't have good content.
I agree with mad4, you need good content to make your link building less painful otherwise you have to go out and request link exchanges with other sites and that is time consuming and boring as you like. However with good content people will link to you automatically because of your content. I personally like to use another way to aquire links which doesnt require me to ask other webmaster for links. Such as developing web applications and giving them away for free