My father-in-law and his business partner are working as brand-managers for a fairly well known model/actress, and want to start selling her own brand online. She has her name on several furniture/decor/clothing brands, but doesn't sell anything directly through her own name/brand yet. They're talking to me mostly to get ideas and throw out keywords and service options because they don't really know the lingo or where to start.

I'm not necessarily looking for bids or people who are interested in working on the project - this needs to be professionally run and they are willing to pay for a professional service. So i'm looking for inputs on services or companies any of you may have used or are familiar with that could provide the following requirements.

- first, they need a webpage designed and built. They have no main website now, so a professional design showcasing her brand and items (for now home decore, going into personal items like jewelery)
- needs an e-commerce backend capable of secure online ordering (most of which will be drop-shipped directly from the manufacturer), order procurement, customer tracking, and limited inventory management (recall most inventory will be handled by the manufacturers)
- possibility of multiple front-end webpages sharing the same customer database, with some overlapping inventories. This would be a future project - at first it will be one front end, but they may create other brands through the same company that will sell similar items


So can anybody make suggestions for providers of these services? Suggestions on systems that can provide all the technical services? Would you suggest we go with a dedicated design company, then transfer the design to another company to run the backend, or find one company that does everything from page design to backend construction to maintenance? They're looking for a service they can basically set everything up, then they can "wash their hands" of the technical details after that - they just want to work on branding and advertising and not worry about maintaining any databases or worrying about customer data security. And they want to farm it out to a provider that can do all this professionally and efficiently instead of running through the IT dept of their current company, or a college kid trying to build his portfolio or something.
thx

1/9/2006 10:41:56 AM

ermmm.... so nobody has done this before?
i can find some site designers from some other threads, but how about services that can host and run a commerce site without much intervention from the client?

1/11/2006 7:26:02 AM

Varien (http://www.varien.com) can handle the site design, ecommerce, hosting, and everything else required for the site.

1/11/2006 9:05:49 AM

that looks excellent. Anyone used any others that offer similar services to Varien?
thanks mark

1/11/2006 4:47:43 PM

I do some marketing work for Pillow Web Design (http://www.designbypillow.com) and we've done a similar site (minus the e-commerce backend) for a model in Argentina...

Her site is http://www.andreafrigerio.com.ar/

Our main designer is in Brazil working right now, but I'm 95% sure that he has done this before. PM me for more information and I'll keep you up to date when we can get a hold of him.

1/11/2006 5:54:21 PM

http://www.atlanticbt.com

The company can handle all aspects including design, backend, hosting, and maintenance.

1/11/2006 6:41:45 PM

pm sent

1/11/2006 10:16:00 PM