How would YOU start eBay?

[Incujosh]

Hi there - my first post here so hoping there's a few friendly and experienced people who might be able to help someone with their first start-up.

I am starting up my first business in the next couple of months. It's an idea that I'd rather keep under my hat, so I'd like to use another business as an example, and ask how YOU would bring it to market.

eBay is the closest thing I can compare it to, so let's imagine it doesn't exist:

How much will building eBay cost you? Do you go to a Digital Agency and pay for the full works, UE and all, or do you find yourself some freelancers and build your own team?

How do you market it? How much do you budget?

What PR strategy do you employ? Again, how much do you budget?

Legal costs - how much should you budget to expect to have to pay?

Forecasting sales - how do you forecast the number of items that will be sold on your site when no-one else exists as a benchmark?

What other costs/strategic considerations would you consider?

As you can probably guess, I'm a young entrepreneur with a *great* idea but no experience in forecasting costs and sales to start it up some am hoping someone with experience might be able to help me!

Hopefully in 6 months time I'll be able to pass on my thoughts to the next generation!

Josh

[Brian Turner]

eBay is a huge corporate operation, so one of the first things to have in place would be a growth strategy that dealt with the different specifics, not simply in terms of sales growth, but also what sort of resources, assets, experience, and professional services you would need at each stage.

In terms of eBay - I certainly wouldn't consider doing something already done and copied to death - but if there's something different about your idea and approach, then there's merit.

However, the real danger so far is that you talk about having an idea, but don't communicate any skill assets you can bring to the table to get it started - this is something of a concern, because there can be great variations in quality from internet service providers, so unless you have some internet experience and awareness behind you, then the danger is that you could find yourself experience delays and even failures to deliver on what you need and felt you paid for, because of this.

2c.

[Incujosh]

Brian - thanks for your response and advice.

Firstly, as you suggest, this is not something that's done and copied to death - it's differentiated and timely. Good aspects are that it's "credit crunch" friendly and, like eBay, my business would be the facilitator for a transaction between others, and that facilitation provides great benefit to both sides of the transaction. Hence the comparison.

With regards to my skill-set, I'm a Project Manager at a leading Digital Agency, so very familiar with managing large scale web builds. I am therefore confident I can deliver a project of this scale operationally. My question here is, bearing this in mind, would it be better to use an agency, or to build a team myself? Does anyone have experience doing both?

The other questions therefore are mainly with regards to the scale of budget that would be needed for marketing and PR, and how much bang you get for your buck here. Anyone have any ideas?

[Webman]

As Brian mentioned a very well planned growth strategy will be needed as in my line of work I have seen more companies go out of business due to rapid growth than for any other reason.
You would benefit from a meeting with a business guru like Brian to ensure you have considered everything and have a contingency plan in place for any given situation.

With regards to the scale of the budget required for marketing and PR firstly who is your target market in both the short and long term. Is this to be an global company like ebay with multiple sites in various languages or is it more local (UK or Europe).

[Brian Turner]

Good to hear that you have experience in this area - that's definitely a plus - we've seen a number of similar threads started by people who can barely surf the internet, let alone set up an ecommerce project!

In terms of agency versus your own team - your own team will be harder to build, but you can set up long term development goals with them and work much more cost effectively.

Frankly, a lot of agencies over charge for basic knowledge as it is, so the more you can control the project competently, then the more cost-effective you should hopefully be able to build it.

Hope that helps.

[Incujosh]

Thanks again for your thoughts Brian.

Webman - the medium term goal is a global site, but phase one is definitely UK. Thinking big, and acting small for now!

Let's assume there was no such thing else out there, and a new starter, eBay, came to you now looking for a basic internet marketing strategy and costs, what would you suggest?

[Webman]

I can not go into too much detail as it will depend upon a number of factors such as time til launch, service provided customer base required etc. But please feel free to PM me or email and we can both go into more detail.

I would begin a relativley inexpensive campaign now even before the site is completed just to test the waters. As you get responses and track the campaign I would then increase the budget.
Using the domain name you plan to use for the UK have a single landing page with a description of what the main fetures of the site will be and a simple email box for prospects to sign up to a newsletter which will inform them of the launch date. Using this tactic I have had customers get more than 15,000 visitors to a new site on the launch date.

To direct traffic to the landing page you can use PPC and SMO both of which you can decide on the exact budget you are willing to spend daily, weekly, monthly etc
Again these are only two of the most basic options but we can discuss these and others in a lot more detail if you wish.