I want to start a site like ebay. (not another one!) How should I proceed?

Sweet holy moly, How much would it cost? (in dollars and if I were to hire an American designer?) I think that would greatly be influenced if you go through a freelance designer, a company, and the experience the Webmaster has.

How long until i get a site up and running? (if I had a team of 3 working on it? / If i had some company work on it?) Again, is there special features the site will have? If it has streaming video for tutorials or for selling it could take longer but then a med to large company might have templates already in place ready to customize so you would not have to start from ground zero. However, they might be a little more static in their design. If you want to focus more on the selling and not so much on the aesthetics going company wise may get you up and running quicker. To build it from the ground up you may have to find someone to write code for it like C++, etc, on top of the HTML, XML, or XHTML code that actually builds the site.

How and where would I market the site? You could see how much it would cost to post links to it on blogs that get read often hopefully you can get it free. You can link it to Twitter have deals Tweeted for limited time to keep people interested in watching the feeds because they could win stuff. Use Facebook to promote it as well as YouTube.

Any interesting ideas on how much to charge on fees? One of the biggest gripes I hear about Ebay is that the fees nit pick you. If you are not selling a high amount or hardly none at all the fees start to nickel and dime you. I would go with a flat rate from zero up to X amount of sales and each ad would get five free photos.

Being in Brazil I guess you will have to figure if you want the international people to participate or just the area there? Are you going to commerce in every category or be more selective or exclusive? What special feature did you plan on having that Ebay didn’t that would set yours apart? About 7 years ago the b/f of a friend of mine created a site similar to Ebay and it cost him about $6,000 US all together, and it took more than a year to get a foot but he didn’t aggressively advertise it either. With the detail you do have that is about the best I can do for you at the moment.

Excellent answer, greatly appreciated!