Visual Basic

ok 1st off sorry if this has been posted I searched, but wasnt sure what to search for... so here it goes

I want to make a program, so people can search through our inventory, say they want to search for a shirt? or something, it gives them the quanity we have in stock, and the price of the item... so I was wondering if maybe I could find a tutorial or get some pointers to go about doing

how is your data stored? Are the customers going to be doing the checking in store or over the internet, since if they do it over the internet vb won't be able to handle it, unless you use asp?

well could I store the data say in a .txt file or something and host in on my site... and idk. this is a bad idea for a newb like me, so im just gonna give it up.