Building an Ecommerce Store: Do I need of a programmer?

[Richard]

I think this thread might be relevant to this Forum. I'm going to update my status of my recent project on my journal, but before I do that I want to focus on my product right now. I'll be posting an update soon dealing with everything I'm working on, and maybe I'll get some feedback.

Right now I'm creating two sites. One is a lead generation site, and the other will be a platform to sell my leads. I have a basic lead management system set in place for my lead generation site. A CRM, and found out how to automate information on my leads into a spread sheet.

Yet, once it comes down to selling those leads... How can I distribute them from my spreadsheet, or other lead management system like a CRM? For instance, someone decides to buy leads from my ECommerce site, how can I automatically distributed it to them?

I'm looking for relevant plugins, and I don't see much that'll help me out here yet. What do you think?

 

[Steve]

Fake it till you make it.
Forward the leads yourself until you have more than one paying customer.

Then you will have a better idea of how the system should work, as well as some money to spend on a developer or plugins etc if needed.

 

[SmokeTree]

Store the leads in a database. Have a database table of subscribers. Have another table of what type of leads they are subscribing to. Have a process query the data, create a CSV and then send the leads to the customer. Wouldn't recommend trying to shoehorn WP or any other CMS into being a lead network, just create something simple or hire a dev if possible. Trying to turn WP into something it's not is almost always a dead-end street.

 

[Joe]

What smoketree described would mean: yes get a programmer.

What he described is simple for a dev like himself, but insurmountable by a layman. I think a lot of devs like us forget this: things trivial to us are impossible to everyone else. Which is why devs get paid what they do, and why they should avoid the bad habit of using the word "just".

@Richard, I'm sure commercial software like shopify is capable of doing what you've described, so in terms of "getting it up and running rapidly without steep learning curves" that's likely your best bet.