Brand New Site. E-Commerce
Are you getting your slice of the online sales pie?
Over $1 billion is being spent online by credit card each month in Australia. In today’s busy world where the consumer is time poor, online shopping is becoming the answer to their shopping needs.
Most businesses start online as a brochure-ware, or informational website, where consumers are able to look up information about the business and services.
Once you have become comfortable with being online and managing inquiries there is a natural progression to selling products directly over the web. To many it seems like it might be both hard and expensive - which is not really the case.
There are of course new costs involved and no 2 sites are the same so there is no easy way to just give a flat fee for any site, as questions about who will load up the product information, will it come straight from your point of sale database, photos, pricing updates etc all have to be considered.
The basics of an e-commerce site are listed below, but there are lots of little things that have to be considered if you want to get it right.
To operate an e-commerce site, the basic following elements are required:
- Products to sell.
- A shopping basket. This allows customers to select items that will be held until they are purchased at the checkout page.
- Checkout page. This captures a person’s details and carries through their shopping basket to the processing page.
- Credit card processing page. This is normally done in conjunction with a third party payment gateway provider. For further information, visit our payment gateway page.
- A SSL (secure socket layer) certificate. Certificates act as electronic ‘passports’ that establish an online entity’s credentials when doing business on the web.
Having an online shop is not expensive.
We recommend Ireckon Shop (of course, as we built it), and for as little as $55 a month, you can have an e-commerce site that allows you to add and manage your inventory.
We can make Ireckon Shop work with any site design (well 99% of them) so if you already have a website you don’t need to completely redesign it to incorporate an online shop. Your online shop can be integrated as an add on to your site using a sub domain such as http://shop.domainname.com.au.
Of course, to generate sales on your website you still need to get found by your customers, and need to look at how you drive quality traffic to your website. It isn't any good having a shop no one knows about so before you invest in getting the shop built we will also discuss how you are going to promote the site and what search engine optimisation needs you might have.
