ecommerce site...

[sheldor]

A friend wants to start a t-shirt business.  I found zazzle but they work on a commission but he doesn't like that.  I know there are templates - do those really work?
it would take a while to do this from scratch.   any suggestions?

[Rico]

http://www.radvisions.com   LOL!

But seriously, to start I would use Zazzle or Cafe Press or something like that.  Much more visitors and traffic than your own website for t-shirt business.  100 sales making $2-3 a shirt is better than a few sales make more money per shirt.

As far as building a site from the ground up, I like Wordpress a lot.  And version 3 is out and it's pretty slick and tweakable.

[billybob476]

My last two jobs consisted of building e-commerce sites from the ground up. Let me tell you, it took a team of two of us 3 months straight to do that. There's really little point to doing so unless you want very, very specific functionality that isn't offered anywhere else.

Another option is setting up an eBay or Amazon storefront, however the easiest way is Zazzle or CafePress. It's really the best place to start.

[Rico]

There are actually a couple nice plug-in modules for Wordpress that work pretty well for e-commerce (up to a certain scale).  But Joe is right and like I said, Zazzle or Cafepress is the way to go.  I happen to have some discount codes for Zazzle if he decides on that route.  They are on the main website.

[sheldor]

Yeah, I looked at both these.  This would be a good start and while he is using these guys, we can bulid a template based site.  Even after the site is built, he can still use zazzle, etc for advertising.  I'll check out wordpress.  I thought about the ebay option but doubt he is interested in that.  Thanks for the advice.

I'll let him know about your discounts RIck. OOooooo - maybe he's a trekkie and will join the board.   That's right - what the world needs now is not love sweet love but ANOTHER trekkie. :)