Working With Rails

I am a successful NYC based serial entrepreneur starting a niche social ecommerce website. We will get as many people as possible to use the site, however, the site will still be highly profitable even if only a few thousand people end up using it, but I highly doubt we will have that small a number of users:). The website is already fully designed in photoshop files and I have detailed storyboards demonstrating exactly how the site will work.

You will be responsible for taking my PSD files and storyboards and then building them into a fully functional website. I figure we can work out an additional ongoing monthly fee for you to perform any necessary maintenance on the site and make sure is remains up and running smoothly. I’m open to discussing a larger budget if you feel you can’t program everything yourself and need to outsource some of the grunt work to additional onshore or offshore developers.

From a pure tech POV, my site is a clone of overstock.com with some niche/clever/profitable social features built on top of it (and of course a totally different design). By a overstock.com clone, I mean that when a user clicks on a product they are interested in buying, my site will give the user the option to buy it directly from my website AND ALSO show the user prices that other ecommerce sites are selling the product for (allowing us to collect affiliate revenue). Please see this overstock.com screen shot for an example= http://www.box.net/shared/xg6crj7dnn

When a user buys an item directly from my site I plan to use services like doba.com and other drop ship suppliers to source and mail the item (allowing my site to keep a totally “virtual” inventory of physical products). To let users compare prices other sites are selling a product for before buying the product directly from my site, I plan to use the API/affiliate-programs of large ecommerce sites such amazon.com, bestbuy.com, ebay.com and so on.

I am guessing the site could be built pretty quickly using a combination of Ruby on Rails, Magento, Lucene/Nutch, Java and/or Javascript, MySQL and more. HOWEVER, I will use whatever programing language, open source software, licensed software and so on that YOU the Developer/CTO feel is best for the project. Getting the site built as quickly as possible and the ability to make quick/agile changes on the fly (without having to sacrifice code quality or scalability) is very important to me.

This is a freelance position, however I’ll give you the option to come on full time at a later date if you absolutely fall in love with the project. Look forward to hearing from you (and totally blowing your mind when you see the full idea, storyboards and PSDs !!!:)

Developer requirements are as followed:

1. Must be based in or near New York City.

2. Understanding of how to technically integrate with drop ship
suppliers.

3. Understanding of how to combine the APIs/affiliate-programs from
many different ecommerce websites into a single “mashup” on my
site.

4. Technical understanding of Facebook and Twitter integration.

5. A major plus (but, not a requirement) would be experience
working at an ecommerce website carrying over 100k different
products and/or “virtual” drop ship inventory.

Cheers!