Pay to post

I need to pick everyone's brains a bit on this one. I am very new to programming. I have done basic HTML, but that's the extent of it. I will be bringing in a professional web developer for my next project, but I need help wrapping my thoughts around what my website will require. Once I figure that out, I will know what kind of developer I need to look for. I am looking to set a website up in the style of craigslist. It will be a site where people pay to post their classified ads. I know, I know. Craigslist is free, but not convenient in my area as the region is rarely used and you have to drive a ways to the nearest big Craigslist region. What will it take to setup a site where customers have to pay before they can post? It will be a pay per post, so each ad will have to be paid for. Thank you.

That’s quite a project, I guess, since you need to set up some payment processing script to handle that part. Depending on the kind of payment and your country of citizenship/business you might have to get a license from a bank or credit card company to process the payments and/or pay a monthly fee. And for ease of use you might wanna employ a credit/point system so they basically pay for credit points in their user account and those can be spent on posts with a click of a button.

In any case, you need a back-end developer (PHP/ASP.NET/JSP/ColdFusion) and at least a four figure amount of money to pay them. I don’t know if there are premade scripts for that. Could be since you aren’t the first one with the idea of online payment but it still needs to be customized, I guess.