e commerce

Whether you want to reach more customers across the UK, or across the world - an online shop is the best way to access a bigger customer base for your business. Using our state of the art hosted solution offers you many advantages: low running costs, unbeatable performance, free technical support and full integration with secure online card processors.

You can upload and manage your stock levels and orders easily and have access to a great range of display and marketing features whenever you want. New marketing advice is available all the time with a free monthly newsletter to help you develop your online business.

First Impressions Count

Studies have shown that internet users make up their mind about the quality of a website in just a few seconds. This is particularly important for ecommerce websites as if your site isn’t up to scratch, it will be turning off potential customers. Your new site will be custom designed on photoshop to give a polished and professional look, which is then integrated into a user friendly layout, to encourage people to browse and buy online.

Flash Panel

The design spec includes for provision of an eye catching flash panel, to increase customer interest and provide you with the opportunity to display images that showcase the activities of your business. This is a search engine friendly feature and one that can be used for advertising and marketing too.

Product Information

Text and product images can be displayed in a number of different formats, to suit your target audience. For example, text can be highlighted or enlarged, or multiple images used for the same product. Products can also be placed in more than one category across the site. Text changes can also be carried out to improve search engine performance and extensive advice will be given on this subject.

Stock Management

Your shop comes with a full stock level management system to keep track of stock levels. The system can either disable or allow purchases when you are low on, or our of stock on a particular item. Given that many customers shop online 'out of hours' this is an important e commerce feature to have.

Invoices

Automatic confirmation emails and invoices are sent to both you and your customers, with the ability to add specific order notes to individual products. Address labels and packing slips are also available to buy.

Order History

You have full access to details of all previous orders and also to all of your customers, including their personal order histories. This information can also be imported and exported at any time into other applications such as excel or your accounting software etc.

Search Engine Optimisation

Your online shop will automatically be submitted to over 1,500 search engines and directories including Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Excite, and DMOZ. The products within your shop will be submitted to the Froogle shopping directory, allowing shoppers to find your products. The shop also comes with an automatically updated Google Site Map, to keep records of all your page content completely up to date with the worlds biggest search engine.

The shop page coding system is designed to maximise search engine performance and also has a Meta Data facility which allows you to add keywords and phrases to your site to help people searching for products online.

Advice will be also given as to the best ways to optimise your product descriptions for search engine performance, how to bring traffic into your site with methods such as online ad campaigns, advice articles, reciprocal links etc.

Multiple Search Facilities

Your shop comes equipped with three different search facilities, to help people browse, locate and compare products easily:

1. An easy to navigate, categorised visual shop forms the core of the site, with the current location displayed on each page. This is great for browsing and comparing different products.
2. A dynamic ‘Product Guide’ menu system allows customers who know what they want to find it fast.
3. Finally, the ‘Keyword Search’ facility allows you to search the whole site for key product words and phrases.

Multi Currency Support

The multiple currency feature allows customers to display prices in different currencies at the current daily exchange rate.

Email a Friend

One of the best ways to market your site is by word of mouth - so a facility to help customers tell their friends about products on your site comes as a standard.

Secure Online Payments

The following payment options can be made available to customers on your shop:

The shop can be integrated easily with all major online payment providers. In terms of who to choose as your payment provider, we often recommend Protx to smaller businesses. They offer a single low flat rate for small businesses that is considerably cheaper than the bigger banks and their system is both secure and easier to use than most others. There is also a manual card processing console on the system too.

For more information on how to go about setting up an online card processing facility and the typical costs involved, take a look at our FAQ's page.

Discount Management System

The discount management system allows you to offer discounts to your customers. The system is very comprehensive and allows you to offer all kinds of discounts including:

• Coupon Codes
• Buy X get X
• Free Percentage discount on specific days
• Order X many products and save X amount of money
• Repeat Customers Specific
• Products Ordered - Buy this, get this free
• Cart Value - Spend more than X and get this reward

Numerous other discounts, offers and rewards are available – making it a very powerful system for building and retaining custom.

Other Facilities

A host of other features are also available if you want to make use of them on your site. These include:

• Customer product reviews
• Highlighted special offers
• Multiple currencies
• Request a brochure
• Custom packing slips, address labels etc etc

If you have a particular feature you require on the site, then just let us know and it can be incorporated into the shop design.

Site Integration

If you have an existing website and want to add an online shop, then we can seamlessly integrate the two sites to maintain a unified brand and look.

Ongoing Technical Support

This will be provided free of charge after the site goes live. Periodic updates to links and minor changes to pages (eg adding a new member of staff profile etc) are also done for free. Any future additions to the site (eg complete new pages, additional features or template changes) will be completed ‘at cost’ – eg £30 per new page etc.

The Bottom Line

Quotes for online shops are done on an individual basis, as the amount of work required is highly variable - depending on the complexity of the site and how many products you need uploading to start with.

Typical costs are around £1300 for a fairly straight forward shop - to up to £2000 or more for complex shops requiring multiple page templates, a variety of advanced functions, or large numbers of products uploading for you.