[intakexhaust]

I appreciate your entrepreneurial spirit and also have considered Amazon. Past years I created a few sites for product selling of my own and have since sold off, but now again exploring new start-ups. I think you have to answer yourself how much to budget for the marketing of the product and pro-forma. Overhead cost from the wrong way of online marketing could be a waste and break a company.

The volume of buyers is certainly there with Amazon and eBay to captivate but if you have a clever enough website to trigger customers in finding you in the top ranking search engines (you only need MS / Bing - Yahoo and of course Google) you could be in good shape.

A few pointers: Acquire a few domain names that most generic represent the item is or what it does and another would be perhaps your company or trade name. To me, a 'keep it simple stupid' approach works. If a prospect clicks one site, you can have it point to your main site or whatever. If the site is stagnant and lost with a million others trying for the top rank, I would list the product on eBay for a buy-it-now and pay the fee for those transactions. Two reasons why: 1) The ebay listing will rank you higher in the google search. 2) IMPORTANT In your ebay listing, depict any images embedded with your website domain inviting customers to the site. You probably already know, ebay no longer permits a link to a website, so this little trick works without any flags.

Are you going big time with outsourcing a web developer or web promotion? For the alternative and super budget, check out a godaddy deal and a rapid built e-commerce website. Tired of Paypal? Talk to your bank, check out the fees and set-up a commercial credit card process linked from your website.
We could talk offline but I will tell you, for now the above strategy is far exceeding my expectations without throwing thousands into a startup. Mind you, I’m at the wee super budget of them all, its experimental and test marketing for a select market which happens to work in my favor. It almost sounds impossible, but I paid $36 initial fee for two years of my own domain and zero per month for website hosting cost, etc. There is a loophole and more freebie tools today than ever before but it may not be anything to suit your marketing needs or image. Also, don’t forget the incredible free and world viewing youtube for product infomercials.

On a larger scale, if you want small company but big time performance, I would suggest NetSuite by the Oracle founder Larry Ellison. When I was with another company and at the time a start-up, we dumped the idea of spending thousands in inventory control, production, marketing software. Netsuite came along and it was amazing within 30 days how well it went between an international based manufacturer and integrated five warehouses. Expect to pay but depending on what size or expectations are, sometimes it may save in the long run. Scott