Mirror Website how to approach my vendor to allow it?

[Scott]

If you mirror their website, you will be doomed in organic search. Google will NOT like the site at all, so while you will save in the development cost, you will never rank well in Google and likely could get banned. This could also potentially harm the site you are mirroring, so they will likely NEVER go for it. - It is just too plain risky.

*IF* you do somehow end up mirroring their content I would suggest that you block all those pages from Google and try to build out other highly relevant content to support the site. If you block the mirrored pages you eliminate the risk of Google Panda destroying you for scraping the content.

$1700 for a full build of an eCommerce website is super cheap - I imagine they are using some predefined templates and would then just import the database of products, but even still.

Best of luck!