What is the best way to build a marketplace?

Question

A client of mine asked if I could help build him an online marketplace. Something were users are able to sign-up, and then upload items to sell.

Just wondering if there are any modules, plugins, or scripts that are available to set something like this up fairly easily.

My clients owns these forums where students trade and sell textbooks to each other, and he would like to expand and put something together where students can upload class notes and sell them through the site.

Any ideas or suggestions on how to go about this without coding the thing from scratch would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for all of the help, Chris

Answer 1

Magento, OpenCart, osCommerce, ZenCart, CRELoaded and many more eCommerce platforms are available freely for you to start and extend but there are nothing as a get & go! solution or somethin' to make money easily!

Answer 2

Buy a 7-11 franchise. Or just sell/list on Amazon, EBay, clickbank.com, etc....

Answer 3

You can always go visit some forums and check if they have a marketplace ask if you could buy a license for their solution. I know that Digital Point & Site Point forums have their own marketplaces.

Also this could be the close one that I have found to date http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=116605

Hope that helps.