I have an idea, but where do I start?

[KidLifeCrisis]

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Godaddy has a stupid "rule" that says if you are reported to be spamming and found guilty they can take your domain from you. This is whether or not you use them for hosting - just registering your domain with them is enough for them to take it.

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If you read the fine print for any domain hosting company, this is pretty much true everywhere.

I think GoDaddy just gets a bad rap because there are more customers, and thus more unhappy customers even though the ratio of haters:users is probably about the same as elsewhere.

[Sniper]

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Godaddy has a stupid "rule" that says if you are reported to be spamming and found guilty they can take your domain from you. This is whether or not you use them for hosting - just registering your domain with them is enough for them to take it.

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Bradley,

Can you post up a copy of the relevant section of GoDaddy's T&C?

[spex x]

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but spex i don't have 150k or any credit history with the bank???

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So save up. You don't need 150k to buy a 150k business. You probably will only need about 30k or less. Most of the time you can put down 30% and get either the seller or the bank to finance the rest. Seller financing is very very common when buying/selling businesses. In some cases you can get a business for a lot less than 30% down. There is a guy in my community selling a 350k business for 20k down, carrying a note for 15 years on the balance. You could save 20-30k in a year easy, even as a college student. And during that time you can build credit.

Also, you talk about an ebusiness as if that would be free to start. It won't. My understanding is that web development can be quite costly. In the shoe business you'll probably need at least $20k just for inventory considering that you'll need so many variety of shoe and several pairs at each size. Then you've still got to pay advertising expenses (which will be enormous considering the competition in the shoe industry).

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since i wrote this i was brainstorming with a friend of mine, and we think we can put together and run an online shoe store. (athletic shoes)

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how do you plan to compete with
www.zappos.com
www.shoes.com
www.sneakerland.com
www.runnersweb.com
www.ebay.com
or the other 1.3 MILLION hits I got in a google search?

I'm really not trying to discourage you, I'm trying to help you. When you've got an idea for a business, you need to think about 1) if you are adding anything of value to the marketplace, i.e., do people want what you are selling; 2) why someone would choose your product/service over the others offering the same product/service at similar rats. Since you aren't the first mover in the shoe market, you've got to have a plan for beating your competition. You can only do this by adding VALUE. How do you add value? By offering the same product/service at a lower price, or by offering a higher quality or more convenient product or service. What is your plan for adding value to the current market?

[G-Diddy20]

spex, i appreciate you taking the time to add your thoughts.

I guess what would make our site unique and "valuable" is that we plan to market to a more, how should I say this, urban type markets among guys ages 14-24 or so, in college or high school. We feel that there would be a good demand for cheaper "in style" athletic shoe's. The links you provided seem to be to a more wider range customer base. I don't think the customer base we want to appeal to would be interested in buying new balance training shoe's or hush puppies, like the shoe's provided in the store's in those links.

Now of course, there are no doubt many other sites in our market also. We have checked them all out and looked at them all and researched all of them exhaustedly. There may be 5 or 6 that we saw that are well done, and the rest seem like just young kids throwing something together charging way to much. We feel we can do better than a lot of them. We can do this by advertising as the cheapest on the internet (which as far as we know is close to the truth if not THE truth). We get the shoes and sell them at close to if not over a %100 markup on every single one and still say that. Also, we feel we can get our site to be the most attractive on the net for our particular brand, and make it look very professional as oppose to a lot of the others.

Another huge, huge thing we are going to use is ebay. We have been following products like what we would be selling on there for the past several days/weeks even and have seen several hundred auctions going off every day for the same products we would offer for MORE than we would try to charge on our actual site. We plan to utilize ebay EXTENSIVELY with our sales, ecspecially in the beginning to get ourselves going. Link our site with every page of auction material we have.


As far as advertising goes, we think we have some good ideas. We would start off SLOW, just in and around our hometowns and campuses and on ebay and try to start moving some shoes for good markup %'s. Once we start to accumulate some profit, we would use that to spend on advertising, website design, fees, and any other unexpected costs. Some ideas we already have about advertising are, make t-shirts and send them out with each item, have our friends where them around, etc (the most costly bit of advertising we would do). Catchy flyers to put up at all of our friends campuses advertising our site, business cards to put in each box of shoes we sell with info about us, deals, etc, the ebay thing where we link our site with each auction we put. We were considering doing a myspace page for it and having as many friends as we could link our site on their pages, facebook groups and friends the same way. Advertising in the free section of all the major cities newspapers. Figuring out away to get advertisements up in as many newspapers around the US and posters/signs/some type of advertisement in as many college campuses as possible is another thing we are looking into. Put, "BEST DEALS AND PRICES ON THE INTERNET" on each and every single ad we put out. BIG BOLD LETTERS.

I certainly think it is doable and there is a market out there for it, and I certainly know that we have the smarts, persistence and drive to make it happen. I think that even though there are many sites out there trying to do this, if we take steps to make sure our's is the top of the line and people know about us and that we about as good a deal as you can get, some money can be made from it i feel in my heart. But then again, I have always been an optimist.


G

[c_lee10]

I am G's partner in this operation and I think maybe you guys have misunderstood a little bit about what our product would be.

First off, thank you to all who replied to this thread even for the criticism because we need all the help we can get and we are inexperienced especially when it comes to making/designing webpages.

The market that we are targeting as G said, are young males ages 14-24. And even more specific, guys on college campuses about our age.

We are not immediately going to be competing head on with the likes of some of those major companies websites that were named previously. In fact, we planned to use our already good reputation and feedback on Ebay to begin selling the sneakers immediately. We will be competing with a select group of websites that deal Jordan brand shoes and apparel. There is a HUGE demand for the Jordan brand amongst the younger generation, and even for the custom designs that aren't sold in malls across America (i.e. "Spongebob Squarepants" sneakers)... I know, sounds silly, but oodles of youngsters are wearing them.

While I know that moving the shoes through Ebay will be no problem, our big questions deal with getting a website up and running. We are not talking about a big operation to start out, so the $20,000 figure for inventory should be more in the $5,000 range, and that we have. When the customer places an order through the website, we would then in turn place our order from our provider, who ships them to the customer. The whole process should be complete in 10 business days. We wouldn't have huge quantities of inventory stacked up in our hands, maybe something around 100 pairs at a given time we would be handling ourselves. Hopes this helps to clarify things and please CONTINUE WITH THE RESPONSES. Any input is appreciated.

[BradleyT]

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Godaddy has a stupid "rule" that says if you are reported to be spamming and found guilty they can take your domain from you. This is whether or not you use them for hosting - just registering your domain with them is enough for them to take it.

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Bradley,

Can you post up a copy of the relevant section of GoDaddy's T&C?

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http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=347385
Bunch of info and links to horror stories.

go daddy spam policy
Go Daddy will require a non-refundable reactivation fee to be paid before the site, email boxes and/or services are reactivated.

The fee is $199. The unfortunate thing is if you have multiple domains with them they'll require that fee on ALL of your domains. One guy was reported for spam for just e-mailing a webmaster asking for an onsite link trade.

[BradleyT]

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Also, we feel we can get our site to be the most attractive on the net for our particular brand, and make it look very professional as oppose to a lot of the others.

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But you don't need attractiveness to sell online. There's a reason why the largest e-commerce sites all have "basic" looking websites from a design standpoint. Let the companies that have spent millions of dollars on e-commerce user interface testing be your guide. There are lots of small details that can help your conversion rate. Here's a great article on just your Buy Button from a year ago - Does your Buy Button Suck?



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We plan to utilize ebay EXTENSIVELY with our sales, ecspecially in the beginning to get ourselves going. Link our site with every page of auction material we have.

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You can't use an ebay auction to link to a website that also sells products unless that link is to an eBay store.

[G-Diddy20]

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We plan to utilize ebay EXTENSIVELY with our sales, ecspecially in the beginning to get ourselves going. Link our site with every page of auction material we have.

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You can't use an ebay auction to link to a website that also sells products unless that link is to an eBay store.

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hmm, can we at least mention on our site name on our auction pages without linking it?


G

[G-Diddy20]

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Also, we feel we can get our site to be the most attractive on the net for our particular brand, and make it look very professional as oppose to a lot of the others.

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But you don't need attractiveness to sell online. There's a reason why the largest e-commerce sites all have "basic" looking websites from a design standpoint. Let the companies that have spent millions of dollars on e-commerce user interface testing be your guide. There are lots of small details that can help your conversion rate. Here's a great article on just your Buy Button from a year ago - Does your Buy Button Suck?

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well, attractiveness i think is important to keep customer's coming back. i certainly want the site to be simple, doesn't mean it can't be attractive. if a site is austhetically (spelling???) pleasing, it would be another reason for a customer to come back. no? great idea by the way about using other large e-commerce sites as are guide to.

[Quercus]

I'm in the apparel business.

Here are some things that you'll need to know:

* Getting known brands to sell to new retailers can be difficult. Getting known brands to sell to new retailers who plan on using the Internet as their primary channel can be even more difficult. Getting higher end brands to sell to new, online, ventures is almost impossible. There is a reason you don't see signs all over the place from people offering deep discounts on popular clothing brands.
* Apparel is inventory intensive. You can't sell what you don't have, and in every style you carry you'll have to carry a variety of sizes. The costs of carrying that merchandise are high. Turn your inventory over often and you are on easy street. Don't, and you're sunk.
* Returns and exchanges are a fact of life. You will get a certain percentage of what you sell returned to you. What that percentage is depends largely on what you sell and who you sell it to. Some of what you receive back can be rehabbed and resold, but a fair amount of it will have to be thrown away. Make sure you keep that in mind when setting your discount structure.