Someone on sitepoint recently asked for some advice on the costs of building a online store and if it was possible with $5k.

First off, building a website and thinking a your most of the way there is crazy.. like building a shop in the middle of the Sahara desert… it can be the best shop in the world but no one will find it. ecommerce is about marketing first and foremost… not the traditional marketing but pay-per-click and seo etc. (this may be obvious but i think it needs to be said.)
50% of time and money should be allocated to marketing at least.

Also, while dropshipping is a great option really you should buy stock if you have any confidence in selling your products.

Some possible steps to consider when building a online store with jshop for example (substitute oscommerce if you like)

Hosting & Domain Name Registration

Maintenance.

This doesn’t include,
Accounting, purchasing stock and shipping products and more i haven’t thought of.

Time is a real cost as mentioned earlier.. while you may buy stock, build a website and market it for 5k you won’t do it without sacrificing a large proportion of your time…How much is your time worth?.. value it on an hour basis… lets assume you don’t value yourself very highly and you think your time is worth $20 an hour.

A store like this built right for 5k could take 3 months of your time almost completely. That’s 10k worth of your time. So in reality it cost you 15k. If you pay a consultant and they do half the work for you then isn’t it worth 5k to you? I’d imagine you could do other things in the mean time.

Its all about ROI(Return on Investment) and understanding time really is money no matter how you slice it.

The money & time required to market a store is directly proportionate to the competitiveness of the market. So if your trying to sell ipods then you’ll have to pay a hell of allot to attract attention. The demand then determines your potential revenue.

Naturally there are smarter ways of doing things which give you the advantage. The question you have to ask is do you have an advantage over anyone doing well in the market currently?

A web development company in Belgium have come up with this brilliant idea:

No Content here, Feel free to add you own. 100% spam.

Basically a one page comment page allowing anyone to add there own.

Now I came across it from a link in http://cssbeauty.com comparing the look of a site on it to this. The pointlessness of the site has got everyone talking about it (including me obviously).

People will add comments because you can get a link back to your site. I did and i checked my stats, I’ve got about 10-20 referrals from it already.

Now there are load of sites out there that do something like this, like the one that allow you to buy advertising pixel space for a dollar but I rather like how blatant and honest this is.

Naturally they have a link at the bottom to there website. If they happen to have there own hosting space (and i’d imagine they do) it only cost them a days work maybe and 30 dollars or what ever for the domain name.