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How To Sell Lots Of Items On Your Website Without Going Broke!
by Jeff Colburn
Many people want to have a website where they can sell large numbers of their wares.
This could include photographs, jewelry, clothing, collectibles or any other of a
wide variety of merchandise. Unfortunately, they have no idea what goes into
creating a website that could display a large number of items.
I was recently contacted by a photographer who wanted to have me create a website
where she could sell her photographs. She wanted to start off listing 1,000 photographs
on her site with another 1,500 to 2,000 photographs added every year. I could easily
see this one project giving me enough money to retire several years earlier than I'd expected.
I estimated that it would take about 10 minutes to prepare each image and put it on
a web page. Each image would need to have a thumbnail and a 4x5 inch image made from
the original, optimize each image, create a popup window for the 4x5 and create a
custom PayPal button for each image offered. At my rate of $60 per hour, this would
be $6 per image. So it would cost $6,000 to set up the initial batch of photographs,
and another $9,000 and $12,000 to add new images each year. This would be on top of
the cost to create the website.
This was going to be a major, time consuming and expensive venture so I set out to
find the best solution to meet her needs. The ideas I came up with will work for any
person who wants to sell large quantities of items from a website. Remember, that no
matter what you sell, you'll need a picture of each item, so you'll run into a similar situation.
I came up with three solutions:
 Make and run a big, expensive website
Put your items on someone else's big, expensive website
Do both of the above
Let's go over the pros and cons of all these ideas.
Make and Run a Big, Expensive Website
The most expensive thing you can do is to make a database driven website. Each item
would be listed in the database, along with its price, description and other information
you want listed about each item. A database site lets you easily add, remove or change
items and can let each page be designed around the user's needs. So if you have a site
selling photographs, and the client puts in a search for Dogs, then a page would be
created with only dog pictures.
The down side is the cost and time to create the website. It could easily take several
months to create the site, and the price tag could run well over $25,000. A similar
sized non-database site would cost only about $2,000 to $3,000, but would lack the
functionality of the database site.
I know of one company that had a site like this done for them. The website design
company had two full-time and two part-time programmers working on the project, at $100
per hour per person. The project took over eight months at a cost exceeding $130,000.
Now that's commitment.
This is not only a sizable financial investment, but if your products don't sell like
you hope it could take years, or a lifetime, to recoup your costs.
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