How to make a site like Amazon - ebay

[CowMan]

Sorry to inject a note of sanity in here, but don't forget that for Amazon, their website accounts for probably less than 1% of their workload. Setting up and running the website is trivially easy in comparison with sourcing the products for sale and distributing them!

If what you're looking for is more along the Amazon Marketplace model, that's going to be quite a different proposition, and is a whole lot more technically and legally challenging, although obviously you won't have the same infrastructure needs.

I already have plans for sourcing the products sale and distributing them. I would start right now if i had the site.

I'm just looking for help on my mission to make this site

[aaarrrggh]

Well, writing something similar is very different to trying to do the same thing as Amazon.

If you're just starting out with code though, there's no way you'll do this well the first time out. It's just the nature of programming - you'll end up with something that's not so easy to change over time the first few times you code something up.

I'd recommend starting with a smaller project unrelated to this in order to get a grasp of the basics, and then work towards making this system when your knowledge and confidence has increased.

Thanks for all the replies guys!

1. Finding the products to sell is not my issue. Neither is all the bits and bobs like currency conversion etc
2. I am looking to make a uk site SIMILAR to Amazon. Doesn't need to be AS complex as Amazon. Ps I always use Amazon and realise how complex it is. The recommendation tool alone!!! That's why i'm looking to make something SIMILAR to it.
Something which is very difficult, but is DOABLE by an individual, then i can learn and build on it, in time.

The scale is major issue. I'm with hostgator, however i'm not too sure how much they can handle.
Any recommendations and explanations?

Thanks!!

[vectorialpx]

Well, for me, if you say similar to Amazon, I will just assume you will do Amazon but a bit different.
If I say "I'd like to do something similar with the White House building" you don't expect me to create a simple house, but a white house looking like the White House.
You should've just say you need to create your own store without mentioning Amazon or eBay.
However, good luck with the learning and the project!
The scalability comes in time (as resources) but you have to design things well (the database is the main issue)

Update

The scale is major issue. I'm with hostgator, however i'm not too sure how much they can handle.
Any recommendations and explanations?

After you get some money you will afford a dedicated server.
After you get over couple of thousands of orders a month, you will feel the need of an own datacenter.
For now, think about the design (structure and platform) and everything will come in time.

[CowMan]

Ok guys.
I have decided to start up by making an ecommerce site. I'm sure this will help get an understanding of quiet a few things.

Gonna do this manually using php. I will keep you guys updated thanks for all the advice!
I have read and taken all of them into consideration.
You haven't seen the last of me!!

[wh33t]

The main issue is scalability. Could you scale your application over multiple servers worldwide? Can you deal with localisation of all different countries in the world + deal with the posting for each individual country, different laws, different currency conversions and the logistics involved in selling products on this kind of scale? Can your code handle millions of simultaneous users? Can you handle allowing other companies to sell products through your site, and handle the logistics of all of that? Can you analyse your users habits to the extent that you can recommend them products they are actually interested in, on a global scale? Can you deal with special offers, can you deal with thousands of employees adding products to the system at any one time?

The main issue is sheer scale and the size of it all. It's 100% impossible for a single person to do something like this. The problem is that scaling projects to a massive size actually DOES have a big impact on your code, and if your code base can't handle it, it simply won't work. For example, I could code something that may look similar to facebook in terms of functionality, but in reality it'll be nothing like it, because it wouldn't be able to scale. Look at facebook chat for example - I could code something using Ajax polling that would look SIMILAR to the functionality of facebook chat on a small enough scale, but scale this out to thousands or millions of users and it'd fall on it's ****.

There's a reason Amazon employees so many great people and pays them so much money. A single developer could make a drastically reduced size project that emulates SOME of the functionality of Amazon on a much smaller scale, but to do it properly to the size, scale and ambition of amazon is 100% impossible for an individual developer. As I said before, you're probably looking at more like 100 full time, very talented developers and a cost of millions - easily.

I definitely can't say with any certainty that my code could scale like that. My point being though that if I or the OP required the site to scale to across multiple countries and servers we would probably be making enough money to pay others to jump on board. But he could definitely still make something Amazon like! Which is why I encouraged him. Thanks for taking the time to clarify and explain, I appreciate that.