A e-commece section in BHW would be great

I hv learnt so much from BHW last couple of months dats why i am really greatful to this forum.I am working on building e-commerce stores for couple of months and so far my experience tells me that it's slightly different than other form of internet marketing.You have to compete directly with a big e-commerce sites like amazon or ebay.So what is my suggestion is that we should have a section that talks about customer service,outsourcing,seo for ecommerce,merchant accounts,how to build a ecommerce ste without much technical knowledge or how to turn stubborn amazon buyers into buying from your site,How a big e-commerce site runs it's self,dealing with expensive e-commerce softwares,Attracting affiliates for our store,How to find cheap hosting cuz as far i know you you have to run an e-commerce store from a dedicated server,so it's really expensive to build niche or microniche sites and manage hosting for each of them individually.There's already a section for dropshipping it can be included there as well.So i think we must have an e-commerce section and some sticky post to spoon fed us

I second this idea as I am myself building an ecommerce too. It would be a great way to share knowledge among BHW members.

I have a lot of ecommerce experience, if you have any questions pm me or reply to this thread. I will answer for free to contribute to BHW so please dont take this as spam

I can tell you about the construction aspect of ecommerce such as where to host(anywhere really, you dont need a dedicated server). I built every store from scratch as opposed to using them "canned" solutions. I am not knocking them because they are usually very comprehensive and have good support communities, but personally I have a hard time figuring out how to skin them and its easier for me to just build a site myself.

Basically if you have a nice looking template, you want all the usual bells and whistles like a mailing list, affiliate program, good shopping cart, live customer support etc.

As far as competing with big name sites, please dont roast me for stating the obvious, but you need to have either the best price, or a product that others cant get(latest gaming console at xmas time thats sold out, one off's that people actually want, etc). I had a site back in the day that dominated selling watches at 40% off retail, then another site came along at 45% off retail and we were dead in the water within days.

Attracting affiliates, well your in BHW, im sure you can get some ideas, software or info to help with that. Make sure its worth their time and make sure to keep in touch with them and give them the tools they need in order to promote your site and actually help them make money instead of waiting for them to do it for you.

I know you asked for a forum section but I just wanted to throw some insight into my knowledge. I didnt scratch the surface. I came to BHW to expand my ecommerce programming skills into the marketing section.