I need help in determining the sequence of steps to take to open and maintain an ecommerce business that will offer many thousands of products in the Beauty industry. My wholesaler's website is available to me for the images, but they do not have a central location for them, and this means I would need to get thousands of images by going to individual web pages. I also would get a daily datafeed from them which goes directly into Excel, but then I have to get that into MySQL, the database I most wish to use (possibly through GoDaddy). This datafeed will list all of the products available each day. I have ideas, but not a total vision of how I want my site to look. I am not a designer. Basically, I know what I need to have on each page, but the overall look is not something I know how to layout. I have very basic HTML knowledge and that's it! My expertise is customer service oriented. I'll have around 6K for this business. My problem is I don't know where to start. I have begun saving images on my hard drive, but there are thousands that I need. Is this what I should be doing before hiring anybody? I have tried using Image Grabbers such as PictureAce, but many of the images are named with a product number rather than a name, and that would mean I would still have to go to the webpage to see the exact name. I need some feedback on what steps I should take in what order to make this website happen. Because of the industry, I so wanted to be open for Christmas, but doing it right is the main goal. There will be other holiday seasons if the website is as good as I want it to be. I keep going back to the image problem, because it seems to me regardless of who I hired for this, they would need the images of my products. Here are some thing I know I need, there are others I probably haven't considered: Shopping Cart Merchant Account DBA Business License Tax Reseller Number Post Office Box for hanging license and receiving mail (the latter should be minimal) Design MySQL Coding in javascript, html, css, and and any other language as needed Email Campaigns (ongoing for sales, with vivid images) Automation of daily tasks (the datafeed for example) SEO Naturally, I wouldn't want to take any of those steps that would incur a fee, before absolutely neccessary. For example, I don't want to get the mail box and pay $25 or so a month, until I must have an address to go further. I don't want to pay for a license until I have to. You get the picture. If you can recommend the sequence of steps I need to get my ecommerce site open, I would truly appreciate it and of course any other steps I need to take. Sincerely, Dusty's Mommy
Not sure where you are based but my suggestion is that you find someone local to you. Cheers Shane Website Design Melbourne