Seeking quotes and advice about a web store / freelancing service

I'm looking for quotes on the creation of a commercial website (not a corporate one; I'm just an individual). Message me your thoughts. Also, I would really like to do this myself, but I don't really know how long it would take to learn how—or if it's even practical. Maybe it's too much for one person. Maybe I could hire a tutor to speed the process, if it's not too much. I am an intermediate programmer (Vala, Lua, Python, Java, VisualBasic, etc.), and I've done some web design (HTML, JavaScript, Flash)—but I haven't done much in the way of database and network programming, and I'm entirely new to Drupal. Drupal looks like it could make things a lot easier than all on my own, though. I'm not looking to start the paid project right away, as I don't have a ton of money just yet (so I'm looking for feedback right now, and I want to know how much it will likely cost). Anyway, here's what I have on mind:

Short description:
A web store and specialized project-hosting service for authors of digital, creative works, designed with freelancer auction, eBay-like feedback and licensing services in mind. Independent artists sell their stuff through the site. They could also sell different licenses for their works.

Description of site usage:
Let's say you write a book. You go to the site and publish it there (as an e-book). You set the book's price to $2, per sale (you keep $1.70 of that and the rest goes toward maintaining the site and paying the employees, which could include a lot of people, eventually). Let's say your book is poorly written, and you want an editor. You advertise on the book's project page. However, that is not enough. You also go looking through a list of profile pages for editors with good feedback/reviews on their work (editors who are *looking* for work). You bargain with them for whether they will edit your work, and for how much. Let's say you agree to give them royalties from your work instead of a set or hourly price. Suppose the editor did a great job: you give positive feedback. Let's say you want to raise the price to $5, now that you have an edited version. The old version is still available, as people might have bought it, however, and they'll want to know when each new version comes out. You can choose if the people who bought the old version have access to the new.

Let's say you now want an illustrator. So, you do the same thing and get your e-book illustrated. The illustrator draws stick figures. Then, maybe you give the illustrator horrible feedback—that illustrator has a really hard time getting a job again—and you choose not to list that version. Hopefully you didn't lose too much.

Let's say you want an audiobook. So, you become the producer of it (or you hire one through the site). You go out and find a narrator (or a group of people willing to put it all together). You pay them, or give them royalties—or whatever (maybe they're volunteers). They upload the audiobook files after completion. You give them feedback, etc. Hopefully you checked out some of their sample works, and their feedback, before hiring them. Maybe you gave them a few paragraphs to narrate in an online interview process.

Let's say you draw a bunch of background and character art for visual novels, generally. Let's say you want to sell licenses for other people to use them in their games. You sell those licenses through the site.

You could even sell licenses for people to make derivative works of your novel, through the site, and have documentation of that license transfer, through the site (i.e. if someone wants to make a movie of it, turn it into a video game, distribute it to their entire school, or whatever).

Anyway, the idea is to give digital, independent artists a better chance at making names for themselves without going through traditional hardcopy publishers. This is a lot more likely when works are edited, have audio editions, and so forth. Audiobooks are to be a major focus of the site, at first—I figure they'll sell better than e-books, however well they're edited.

Anyway, on with more examples. Let's say you enter a site contest. You win. However, the site doesn't give you money. The site gives you units of profit from certain products. Lets say some of those products are making lots of money, but others are stagnant. You make money if those products make money. So, you want those products to sell. So, you have motivation to advertise. Let's say this gives you an idea. Your novel isn't selling as well as you'd like. Not many people know about it, yet. So, you find some people who have lots of friends and associates. You offer those people a small portion of the profit units from your novel (for a low price—maybe even free). They accept them (hey, why not?) And then they, with all their friends, have motivation to advertise your book for you (even if you don't make as much per sale through the site, anymore; you might make more overall, though). But beware, as they may resell them, or give them to someone else. I call these profit units product shares (I talk about them more below).

Here's another description of the site, but really long, with some implementation details (this is subject to change, if a better method is found):

Note: All your code involved could be released as free software, open source, to the community. I have no real reason to hoard it to myself (I can accept that competition would use it—I want the service out there as much as I want to be in charge of it, and redundancy isn't all bad). I hope this would drive the project cost down some. Volunteers are welcome (the service is designed for the benefit of the artistic/creative community, and not just for itself—it is planned never to be a corporation, unless some day it becomes a non-profit one, and it will not rely on investors, as it will have no stocks).

Note 2: The server will probably start off running through Linux—the latest version of Ubuntu, and not the server edition (potentially either 32 or 64 bit). I'll need the entire site, including user data, to be transferable from computer to computer (and I need to be able to back up the entire thing in case we wipe the hard drive or something).

The site has a few main kinds of objects containing data:
• Projects
• Contributors
• Users

Users contain contributors and account information (this includes information for shoppers, buying and selling). A single user may have multiple contributer profiles (for the sake of pen names, etc.) Contributers should not be traceable to users by other users (nor to other contributors of the same user by other users), unless they choose to reveal themselves.

Contributors have pages. These pages should list all the projects they have contributed to, and how. There should be headings for the different kinds of contributions that person has made: i.e. as writer, editor, translator, narrator, voice actor, programmer, illustrator, director, producer, composer, etc.

The creator, or owner, of the project should be the person who owns the top-level copyright, while most other contributors are merely making derivative works (with some exceptions). For a novel, the creator should normally be the writer (though there are exceptions, especially when it comes to companies with accounts). Contributer pages should list all projects they own, and should list all their contributions. They should also list their feedback ratings and feedback reviews.

There will be consequences for users with so much cumulative bad feedback among their profiles (i.e. they might only be able to post their works, and not to participate in freelance activities or sell product shares—or some such; still deciding on how to deal with this).

Project also have pages, and these likewise link to the owner and to all contributors, saying how they contributed (i.e. writer, editor, illustrator, narrator, director, producer, etc.)

In order for a project owner to upload a project, certain criteria must be supplied to allow that project to be categorized: e.g. type, genre, violence-level, license, etc.

There should be a versioning system such that any time a file has been replaced in the project, it will receive a new version. This should be displayed on the project page.

Project owners set the price of their projects. Shoppers may add projects to their carts from the project pages. Project pages have a name, description; they list criteria, etc.

Project pages may advertise for freelance contributors. For instance, an author may be looking for an editor, illustrator, narrator, etc. They may advertise a price, accept quotes, etc.

Freelance contributors may solicit their services to project owners (if the owners allow for it). They may bid on projects. It is natural that some hobbyists might be willing to pay money to do a service for some honored author (so negative bids should also be allowed).

Now, here is an interesting part. Each product has potential sales. These sales are disbursed a few ways (a certain percent to the company, and the rest to the project owner). This site's disbursements of each product are divided up into units. Let's say your book has 1,000 units. The company might take 150, leaving 850 to the project owner. Any time that project makes money, everyone with its units (which I call product shares) will receive disbursements to their accounts accordingly. These product shares are salable and transferable. Both the company and users may bargain on-site with product shares of their various products. However, ownership of the product shares does not mean ownership of the product (and it does not affect sales off-site). The owner may change the price at any time (or even make it free; even free products have shares, as they may not be free in future). Projects only have salable product shares after they are available for sale or download. Users are banned for uploading projects that are too similar to each other, unless it is a project branch or some such (as they could screw people over this way: if possible, a way to refund any lost money here would be nice). Users are not allowed to remove products from the site without compensating those who have bought its shares, in some agreed-upon way. Also, money should probably only be disbursed after a user has a certain amount to receive (e.g. $5–20+)

Anyway, project owners may agree to give product shares, or money to freelancers for their services.

Don't bother disputing the need for these product shares, unless there's some reason it is entirely impractical. I know it's an innovation, and I have lots of reasons for wanting to do it here—I'm not telling you what all those reasons are, just yet, though.

Both contributer and project pages should be fairly customizable as to the look and feel. It would be nice if every project had a forum and every contributer had a blog—but this isn't a strict requirement. Allowing for embedded sites might be nice, too, but again, this isn't a strict requirement.

Anyway, the main site would have menus and such. I still need to hash out a lot of the details, but you can probably guess what a lot of them are, if you've understood me so far.

Well, let me know your thoughts. Do you think Drupal is my best bet with this project?

Thank you for your insights!