I have an idea ismilar to cars.com however it is more of a niche market as opposed to cars.com's broad appeal.

I was wondering if anyone knows how they make their money, do they take a "commission" from the sales?

I imagine another avenue of income would be advertisements, likely from car companies.

Also, since htye already have a very effective site can any of you who are good at website building, build something similar?

I think every seller pays to list a car with them. They also have some advertising.

As for having someone build this you should there's a lot of back end programming. There are several members here who could probably build you something similar, myself included, but it's not the kind of site that will come cheap. You're most likely talking some serious money to get something like this built.

That's fine, it likely won't happen for quite awhile so I have time to make money.

You have a rough estimate of how much it would cost?

$100,000 if you are serious for a website. It'd need to be a secure, searchable database that is easily updated.

For every car sold expect 100 page views. Bandwidth (all those pictures and page views) would need to be high.

Security is an issue too.

As for the costs to sell - have a look at thier website for the costs - it's not a big secret.

There's been a lot of attempts at building car selling sites, few survive.

There's probably room for a site that sells used parts. Currently to get parts people have to phone around. I have a Toyota Landcruiser and parts are horrifically priced so I try to get used stuff where I can. Every 4WD owner is in the same position - prices are usually very high.

Landcruiser headlight NEW - $220. USED - $40.

You could focus on 4WDs at first or exotic cars like SAAB or VOLVO for a parts website.

Your only other alternative is to get a financial backer, but given the miserable track record of previous attempts at a used car sales website then I don't think it would be easy to find a backer.

Anyway, as you are still a teen then if you get saving I expect you'll be ready by about 2025 to invest. Of course by then we'll have space ships so maybe you could sell used space ships.

Here's some website name suggestions for you:

www.Spaceships_R_Us.com

They make the bulf of their money from car dealerships. On aveerage dealers spend $500-$800 a month to list all of their inventory, they also make money from private seller listings. It would cost around $100,000 to build the site and at least another $100,000 to market it and even then you will have a tough time getting business. autotrader.com, cars.com, carsoup.com and a few others are who you will be competing against.

Vehix.com is going to be problematic as well... It's offered by the cable companies as a valued added service for car dealerships that are advertising on cable TV. In other words their not paying for it at all and the site is being advertised heavily because the cable co's can promoted essentially for free on their own networks. Watch for it to be a big player soon in your market, if it's not already there.

I think machine's advice of starting something like this in a niche would make the most sense. To compete with cars.com or vehix.com is going to take a lot of money. First to buld the site itself, next to maintain the site, and probably mostly for the marketing and advertising required.

A site of that scale is generally not something you would tackle on your own, but would most likely require some heavy backing. That is assuming you'd want to launch on the scale of those other sites.

It would be much easier to launch in a niche, maybe a specific type of vehicle. I like the idea of parts since I think most people going to these existing sites are looking for the entire car.

Parts particularly for older cars can be hard to find and a site where people could trade and sell dfferent parts would probably stand a better chance of surviving and would possibly be easier to launch.

It's still going to involve a lot of back end programming and security and is going to cost a good amount to set up. I think you could get it done under $100k, but we're certainly talking 5 figures at a minimum.

I have been in charge of getting a number of ecommerce sites build over the last few years and I have never paid anywhere near 100.000 dollars for a site with a custom build CMS. I think that you could do it for a quarter of that price.