Need some help with offline clients website

I think most shopping carts are going to be able to handle this easily including OScommerce, Magento and CubeCart. You might need to bring in a php programmer to fine tune it for the customer, but that should be about it. We offer those services if you need them (though looking at your avatar, you look pretty scary).

You can do this sort of thing with Drupal and standard
plugins I think. Find a Drupal developer and ask him/her
if he/she can do it and how much to get it running right -
then get a bid and pad it out to earn your fee.

Not that simple of course, but believe me, implementing
this kind of site will not be difficult for many developers.

Dunno - you could just look on Craigslist and find somebody
in your area you could work with - a problem with hiring
overseas help is they can leave you hangin' - I would rather
see you be able to go over and put your developer in a headlock
if need be.

- just from experience. It's hard to get "remote contractors"
to do what you need them to do. If you are good at getting
clients and putting together the deals you can find some geeks
who have little interest in marketing but love doing development,
even in N. Carolina, I bet.

Helps your local economy too.

I know it's tempting to hire people in Asia to do the work for
you, but there are consequences to such decisions - working
with locals may cost your client a bit more but when everybody
speaks English and is on the same page culturally... well, it
can be good for business in a lot of ways.

I'm not being xenophobic or racist or anything - just practical
because you want to be able to give good service to your
client and have a developer on your team you can communicate
fluidly with.

That's just my thoughts on it. Why ignore all the talent
in your own back yard?

Hi Anthony. If you can, go with Magento. I have used freelancers from Guru - amazing work and reasonable price. I had a huge 1000 product site built on magento for $2k. It took a little over 1 month. PM me, if you want my source...

--Ben

OK, followup question:

The client wants people with products/services to be able to create an account at the site, then have a "store" with their items in it, similar to ebay. From these stores, certain sellers/products will be featured on the main (home) page. Would all of the platforms mentioned here (Drupal, Magento, etc) be able to provide this? I'm assuming that this would entail a combination of the e-commerce platform and additional scripts/plugins...which would be the best combo? Are there any that don't play well with others? My main goal is to make my client 1000 percent happy with it, so I want it to be easy to use for the client as well as the visitor.

Thanks!

Thanks!

I would look into Magento as the base for the ecommerce 'store' but as far as the user being able to login and create listings, that may require additional plugins/scripting for that functionality.

The community orientation with users setting up their
own stores was the reason I suggested Drupal. I'm
pretty sure it's been done with existing plugins. Of
course you may have to sacrifice some of the fancier
shopping cart features by using something like Drupal -
but I would tend to think it makes sense to build the
user-oriented system first (a social networking site
basically, Etsy.com is a good model to look at) - and
then add the store features onto that.

You could work backwards from a shopping cart script
like Magento of course - it's just not what makes sense
to me with my admittedly limited experience. I've read
enough though to think you could pull this sort of thing
off with Drupal or Joomla perhaps.

Anthony,

Come check us out at LocalBizBuilders.Com. We're out there doing this every day. You can find either great advice on how to DIY or one of our members can give you a fair quote on completing what you need done.

Check the forum out, you won't be sorry.

Etsy is a custom-built platform I think. It's a very
involved site with a lot of features. Look at it for
inspiration. It's been around for awhile and I never
saw it before about a year ago, so I don't know if
it what it was like in a simpler form. Now it has so
many community-involvement tricks up its sleeve it
would be a tough act to copy.

John,

Thanks for the tip, posted a question there as well, hopefully between here and lbb someone will be able to shed some light.

This is what happens when you Ready, Fire, Aim! But at least I'm getting some clients.

Thanks