How to make site like Amazon - ebay

[CowMan]

Hey Guys
I am a web designer on a hard(very, very hard) quest to make a similar site to Amazon/ebay.

I have been looking it up and i realise how hard it is going to be, but one way or another i have to do it.
I will be making it using PHP, MySQL. I am pretty good with HTML and CSS. I have little experience with PHP.

Right now i am reading and applying methods from - Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL
I aim to make an ecommerce site first and then carry on with that.

I am not expecting all of my answers from one source.
However, i am willing to bring all the bits and pieces together and make this happen.

I need all the help i can get! Thanks!!

[felgall]

Each of those sites has employed dozens of people for several years to write the code for their site. For you to do the equivalent by yourself will be a full time job for several decades.

[Celtboy]

You have a really lofty goal and I applaud your dreams. Building a basic e-commerce site is a challenge in and of itself; you might be better off building a wordpress site with an ecommerce plugin like opencart, marketpress or shopify. They do a lot of the work already for you.
Here are some of the major areas you'll need to consider:
- user authentication
- inventory (and how to 'reserve' items, for instance if you have 3 in stock and 4 people all try and add to cart at the same time...)
- adding items to cart
- sales / coupons / discounts
- template + layout. Creating individual php files for every screen will make you crazy, and isn't very URL/SEO friendly. You'll likely want to look into a great framework such as Symfony, CakePHP, ZEND, Yii, or Laravel
- contacting users; notifications

there are probably several areas I'm leaving out, but don't make the classic new developer mistake that if you don't build all of it by hand, it isn't legit. A lot of very talented people have already encountered a lot of real world problems and built great solutions to those--it isn't cheating to build off of their success.

[tangoforce]

Originally Posted by felgall

Each of those sites has employed dozens of people for several years to write the code for their site.

On the contrary, many of these sites started off in the infancy of the internet as one man bands and just grew from there.

Originally Posted by felgall

For you to do the equivalent by yourself will be a full time job for several decades.

Yep I'd agree with that for a learner. It depends how good and how fast you are though. There are some coders out there who can put up an entire ecommerce site within days with FAQ and support pages included. I would suspect though that these people are the ones who have the same base / template code they recycle from one project to another.

[tangoforce]

Originally Posted by Celtboy

don't make the classic new developer mistake that if you don't build all of it by hand, it isn't legit. A lot of very talented people have already encountered a lot of real world problems and built great solutions to those--it isn't cheating to build off of their success.

I couldn't agree with that more. As someone who struggles to do everything by hand and never wanting to spend the time learning how to use someone elses shortcuts, I find that a lot of time is taken up just doing the basic stuff. Although this makes me a better coder it has the undesired effect of making development time a lot longer.

Good advice