Good Idea? Bad Idea?

Well the last few weeks I?ve been saving money for wprobot to start creating several AutoBlogs and still plan on doing that in the future but have put that on hold for now. I have told some of my family what I?ve been doing and how I plan to build websites. So my mom calls me up last night and asked if I could build her a website for her hairstyling salon and put beauty products that she sells on her site. I figured sure why not, it would be a great way to start out building my first site, plus I?m helping family out.

Then she proceeds to tell me that the professional product she buys is heavily discounted because she has a beauty license and proof of salon ownership, for example she said she buys shampoo, hairspray etc? for around $10 a piece and marks them up to $20 and that?s when the light bulb clicked on in my head, this could be a money maker!

Some things I have thought of doing with the discounted beauty products:

1. Of course build her a little estore for her website and she can hand out business cards to each of her clients and tell them that they can now order her products online.

2. Put these products on either Amaz0n or Egay and talk to her supply store about drop shipping the products directly from their site store, or I could ship them myself (which might end up being a pain having a full time job already).

So BHW members I had a few questions?

1. What is a good WP store plugin? Is there one that would auto load products from the suppliers website to mine?

2. If you were in my situation how would you capitalize on the discounted Beauty products?

All the help will be greatly appreciated. Oh and if anyone can point me to good training on running an estore or anything similar to my situation that would be good too!

Thanks

Hmm good questions. I'm interested as well in this.

If it helps any, here's some of my bits. My mom has a tendency to make things. I won't say what but crafty things. I tried a custom estore in the past just using Mal's ecommerce shopping cart with a fancy theme I bought from Template Monster. And it worked pretty well. We sold some stuff through adwords. Losing money though since I was spending too much on adwords. But the concept seemed solid.

I decided I couldn't take managing the store for her and her inventory. So I set her up on Shopify. She's definitely been able to manage her inventory and blog posting and stuff herself, though she still makes tons of mistakes. But gets through it. So I guess if you want to be kind of hands off on the store I might recommend something like Shopify. If you want more control because you are going to do it all, I warn you. It might sound great at first, but when parents are involved things get messier.

My current process is to just worry about the SEO and traffic side of things. I'm going to let her run her store. And I'm running a blog or two as satellites to try to bring more traffic to the store. Just getting started with this. I'll let you all know how things progress.

Sounds like a good idea.