Website developmnet

Hi, I have a project that needs a Web site with this sort of requirement: 12 wholesalers maintaining their 12,000 – 100,000 products for sale, including special deals etc. A “Master Product File” needs to cross-reference the wholesalers for price comparison. 2000 customers who need to access their history, compare, and order products (about 10 times a day each = 20,000 accesses per day with up to 500 on line at any one time) from the wholesalers and via the Sales staff who may need to pre-process some orders (even if they happen to be at the beach). 800 Manufacturers who need to be able to offer special deals to selected customers, direct or via wholesalers. 3000 Sales staff who are tracked by the system – where they are, and their sales history. Customers should get “live” advice on failed orders and Invoices from the Wholesalers. Audit trail (can be archived to keep the size down) of all activity and Edits, and a means to “count” certain kinds of activity for billing purposes. e.g. a small fee charged for each order placed. Obviously “normal” stuff like adverts to display and click to view the offer. Several people have had a go at this, and failed because they used non-linear XML databases for the products and audit trails, so the systems ground to a halt in a couple of weeks. Also very unstable! In other words, the usual tools for a Web site are quite useless for this job. In my experience, this system can work fast with “all linear” data files with fixed record lengths, and record number pointers to hang everything together and keep transmit files tiny. User PC or Tablet machines can have supporting databases to limit on-line fetching (and off-line working on an order) – but I think we are looking at some html interfaces to give platform independence (but no good for the `engine’). Regards