Business Idea

ADChick

Hello all,

I have an idea for a business but not sure how to go about it. It would basically be like an online shop but with a twist that I haven't seen any other online shop use (that I could find anyway!). The thing that worries me is that there could be a reason for that, it might be harder to implicate than I thought.

What's the best plan to go with? I could set up an online shop but I have no idea where to start with that. I think this is an idea that a existing site could implement fairly easily, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone had already came up with this idea. I'm fairly certain it isn't something I could patent as it's an idea that isn't really tangible at the moment.

What's the best idea? I could set up the store, but have no idea where to start with taking payments, etc. I could try taking it to a larger company but I guess they could just take the idea and fob me off? Any tips?

fishybusiness

Regarding an online store, everything is possible.

It really depends on how much you can do yourself, or want to do, how much money you can put in to the pot to have someone else do it, and then the big question of how to get traffic to your site.

Everyone involved in ecommerce has a view, often conflicting with others due to personal experience, likes and dislikes, and store requirements. Perhaps you need to talk to one or two web design companies and get a feel for what is involved, and what their views are?

Regarding payment, Paypal is almost universal, and Stripe is a good alternative for card payments without too much hassle.

InsideInsurance

Many ecommerce websites use standard software with a few plugins to get the functionality they want. There are low setup cost ways of entering the space using straight forward webhosting, one click installation of oscommerce, paypal for payments etc.

The challenge comes with "the twist" and how much time and effort that would be to implement. The norm would be to have a conversation with a web development company and get their views on its complexity.

cheexy

ADChick, I sent you a PM

Mistral001

Many people start by selling on ebay first. There are fees to be paid on every item sold but it costs nothing to start selling there and it could give you an indication whether your idea is a good one before you invest larger amounts on websites and promotion.

Double_V

I have sent you a PM.

paddyrg

Beware, custom software development is expensive (5 figures plus), even for the simplest custom system. Sure, there will be a load of students who'll offer to 'do it' for a grand, but you will get what you pay for. Typically it'll be lousy code, the fun bits will be overworked, less fun bits underworked (integration test plans? What are they? Oh, you didn't say you wanted it robust and secure!). You'll typically get something that doesn't sanitise inputs, doesn't have a great management interface, will be vulnerable to xss/SQL injection (or other classes of vulnerability), and not be righteously tested. Shop websites are handling money, maybe even handling credit cards (and that opens up a whole other class of regs required) etc. Probably impossible to maintain, and when you take it to a professional developer to try to fix it, it'll be impossible to maintain and require ground-up rewrites. You're not a technical architect or business analyst, so managing scope will be impossible for you unless you've PM'd a number of IT projects already.

Not that a fresh graduate can't code, some are very good (although most aren't, and will step into every anti-pattern along the road), what they don't have is the mature development lifecycle that means you run your business on business-quality software. If the site mischarges customers, or breaks easily when they misspell a product, or use a different alphabet, or enter their address in emoji, or whatever - you lose a customer forever. Online should be considered a hostile environment, your server and site will be pinged with automatic vulnerability scans many times a day. The base platform vulnerabilities will commonly be exploited within 24h of a new bug being found.

cheexy

Paddyrg stop being such a naysayer. How has your "the sky is falling" post helped OP?

paddyrg

My post has encouraged the op to proceed with caution, not accept the word of an inexperienced but enthusiastic coder when fresh development is always an expensive and risky R&D project. I've seen people go down that path, only to push back their company by a year having to begin again completely from scratch. Or another company I was brought in as a part of a rescue team when they had 3 weeks money left on the company before having to close the doors and lose 30 people because they'd stitched themselves up with going cheap being unqualified to manage an IT project professionally internally. It took us 9 months to undo the mess (but yes, we got them past their 3 weeks crisis line, and they're still trading 15 years later).

I don't want the inexperienced OP to spend money on a bunch of promises without knowing the full context. If they can configure an existing system to their 'twist' without original code, great! But as soon as you start tweaking modules or rewriting parts, you lose all upgrade paths, and unless you understand the risks (financial and legal) of doing so, you can't make a rational business decision. Instead should I just say 'yeah, go to fiverr and take the lowest bid'?!

cheexy

Paddyrg
None of us know what OP's "twist" is. Would it not be more helpful to understand this first rather than spending so many words telling OP about all that could go wrong? Painting the bleakest picture never helps anyone especially one just attempting to start a business.

pooandwee

Is there any way you could test the 'twist' before spending much money i.e. throw up a simple website explaining what you do with a simple paypal button on it. Pay for a few google ads to drive some traffic and see if anyone is interested.

Id advise doing this before you spend any money on producing items