TU Books

I envision my website looking similar to the following: [[login to view URL]<wbr />webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/<wbr />TBWizardView?catalogId=10001&<wbr />storeId=13559&langId=-1][1] I would have a database of departments, a database of courses, and a database of required textbooks. People would select from a dropdown list of departments. Then they would select from a dropdown list of courses offered by that department. Then they would select the course within the department that they are taking. They would do that for however many classes they are taking. Then I want the website to search several sites that I specify (Amazon, EBay, etc.) for all the ISBN's of the textbooks that the student wants, and I want the website to return the cheapest 3 or so options that it could find on the internet. But I ideally don't want the source of those options (Amazon or Ebay for example) to show up. I want it to look like I have those books in inventory. This upcoming part is probably the most complex. When the student "orders" a book via credit card, once I reveive cash from the credit card company (assuming that's basically instant), I would want my account to automatically order the book the student wanted from the website origin of that book. So, for example, if Amazon had the cheapest physics book, that book would be one of 3 that show up on the student's search screen. He then "buys" that book, but what he is really doing is sending cash to me. I then automatically order that book from Amazon, and the book will ship to me and I will eventually deliver it to the student. If keeping the actual owner of the book hidden doesn't work, then I could show the customer the source of the textbook, and I can have him create an account under my website, such as ex: usernumber@[login to view URL], and the order form that that user fills out will be understood by Amazon or wherever, and the book he orders would be sent directly to him. My ideal option has the book being sent to me, but I understand that that could be more difficult. ## Deliverables Here is an email I received from a friend who knows a good deal about computer programming. Perhaps it will help: If you actually want it to do a search, you need a web-crawler, etc. That's a very non-trivial. You'd need your own data-center, hundreds of machines, specialized developers, way too far out of your budget and completely unnecessary for what you want. All you need to do is have a list of places for it to search and then plug in to each website's own search feature. For this part, you could probably use shared hosting and hack together a perl script to run the searches at these other places and aggregate the results. That part is trivial. There are a few "tricks" you could add that would improve things. One is to keep track of schools and course #s used by other people so that as more people use the service, the ISBNs are pre-filled and newer customers need to enter less information. The second is to not just search for the cheapest prices but to factor in shipping (which is less if you get from one place than from two) and possibly some sort of user preferences (e.g. "only buy off of ebay if it saves me at least 10%", "never use so-in-so", "buy used only if it has no writing, is in at least good condition, and saves me at least 20%", etc.). This would make the search tool much more useful since it would be doing a constrained minimization on their total cost -- something that is a PITA to do by hand. The complicated part is processing the orders. If they pay you, you are obligated to deliver the book, so if you buy it from ebay, you'll have to deal with the ebay seller who doesn't ship correctly and all that other mess. What you want to do is to place orders on their behalf using information that they provide you. You can make money by charging a small convenience fee or by taking advantage of referral programs that most larger sellers have which would give you a % of each sale you send them. Obviously using the latter is preferable as it doesn't cost your users anything but still gets you paid (and probably in higher amounts than you could get away with charging.) I know amazon has one, you could check for ebay, abebooks, etc. What you should probably do is have some sort of minimum fee and then deduct any referral amounts from that amount (and factor this into the price search.) The second part of the application is much harder. Just giving them the referral links would be trivial, but then they have to actually place all the different orders themselves. So, like you said in your email, you need some kind of auto-order bot that takes their information once and then goes to each website and orders it for them using their information. This is easy enough for places that don't require an account to place an order, but for places that do or for places like amazon that have services like AmazonPrime shipping that they may want to take advantage of, you are going to have to store their login information at each place or come up with a way to have them securely login each time you need them to. Barring things like AmazonPrime, the easier way the handle this is to create an email account for each customer, usernumber@[login to view URL], and use that to create an account for them and place the order. The trick with this order bot is dealing with website changes. If everyone always kept their forms the same placing the orders would be trivial, but you are going to have to come up with a way to easily update it, or contact the places you are searching through and get some kind of API to reliably place the orders through. (Some of them may already have such an API or you might be able to find people who produce one and use theirs.) The order-bot probably won't work properly on shared hosting. So you'll have to pay the extra money to get at least VPS. That's beneficial in another way because you won't be stuck using PHP and Perl to do it. You'd be able to use an industrial grade application framework like SmallTalk on Seaside, Ruby on Rails, or Scala on Lift. I'm partial to Seaside, but its features may not be needed for what you are doing and you can probably find Ruby and Scala developers more readily. So in answer to your original question -- you would have to spend around $25/month to get a quality VPS hosting environment. The other part of this, getting it developed, is less complicated than you think. If you get the specifications hammered out, you could post a request for bids on a place like [login to view URL] and see what it would cost you. I think the bids you'd see would be pretty reasonable, probably a few thousand. To help get the bid low, I'd figure out what specs various good VPS providers make available, and then give the person submitting the bid the option of choosing between the options -- that way you'll get bids from more than just one set of developers and can go with the most cost effective one. At this point, I'd try to compile a list of places you want searched, and figure out whether they have a way to automatically place orders and whether they have a referral program. Then using that information, I'd put together the website specs and go to vworker and request some bids. Then you can decide if you want to go through with it.