building a site similar to half.com

If you were going to build this site, generally speaking what would you do?

[CMChris]

I hope this isn't too broad a question but I've been 'spinning my wheels' now for about a week now trying to conceptualize an idea. It wasn't until tonight that I realized that half.com does everything that I need done, just on a larger scale. My ideal would be to find a sort of mimic opensource code (like everyauction is to ebay) and then try to modify where neccessary. Does anyone know if something like this exists?

If not, psuedo-wise, can anyone give their thoughts on how the half.com could be put together? When I say pseudo, I mean what's my best way of approaching this? To me it seems the project could be broken down into (or at least these are the features most important to my project):

1. A search based shopping cart of member's current products. The search returns from a database a relevant listing of items for sale. Clicking on a particular listing brings up the member(s) who are selling this product. The shopping cart database must be integrated with item #2.

Anyone know of a shopping cart that has some/all of this functionality?

2. Members must be able to post/edit/delete items from the database associated with the shopping cart.

3. Ability to track all sales during the month then invoice members (preferably automatically).

I guess in general I'm looking for a shopping cart system that set's the administrator up as a service medium. That is, I'm not selling my products, rather my product is allowing others to sell their's through my site.

If I'm asking the wrong questions or seem to be off track please let me know as well. I've got a strong niche market, just trying to find the web application solution to exploit it.

Thanks,
Chris

[TallTroll]

Oof, thats some pretty heavyweight software you are looking for CMChris. If you've got the niche market, then the project ought to be worthwhile, but finding (or writing) the software is likely to be a big task. Even if you can find a ready-made package, you will almost certainly want to customise it.

Thats one of the drawbacks of dealing with niche stuff, theres always something that doesn't fit the mould of whatever system you are adapting.

I can't say I've ever come across anything close to what you are after, and I don't have the programming skills to offer advice there either, but maybe one of the code junkies out there does