Selling products and services online has become an essential for many businesses. Customers expect to be able to see what you do on your website, then buy from you online. Whilst there are a number of options for selling through large organisations such as Ebay and Amazon, for some businesses having your own online shop makes a great deal of business sense.
Online shops can integrate with your stock control system to ensure that your customers are kept informed as to how many items are available – and when something is out of stock. Your e-commerce platform can work with your accounting software to cut down the amount of administration there is to do. Selling directly to your customers means you can ensure that your customer service reflects you and not a larger intermediary.
There are a number of reliable and safe e-commerce solutions that can be used to add a shop to your website. It can be a bit daunting to decide which system to use and this is where your web design company can help you. Whichever system they recommend, make sure that they have the most up to date accreditation. For example, we use Magento for our e-commerce websites. We are investing in training so that we can have a Certified Magento Developer on our team.
We’ve put to together a list of 20 questions that we ask our clients to answer. This means we can make sure their online shop works exactly as they want it to – and is easy and safe for their customers to use. If you’re considering selling online, start off by answering these questions yourself. It will give you and your web developer clarity and save time getting the project started.
- How would you like to take payment?
- Do your products need to be searchable?
- Will you be using Google Pay Per Click advertising for the website?
- Do you have existing product data in spreadsheet format that you’d like to import?
- Do you want to give repeat/trade customers a discount?
- Will you offer discounts on quantity?
- How do you intend to charge for postage?
- Do you want customers to be able to find their address using a postcode search?
- Will you be selling to international customers?
- Do you want to use promotional voucher codes to give people a discount on their order?
- Do you want to cross sell products? (e.g. Have you bought batteries for that?)
- Do you want customers to be able to leave a review about a product they have bought?
- Will any of your products have options (size, colour etc)?
- Will you want any product filters on the site (e.g. if you sold TVs you might want the customer to be able to filter by screen size)?
- How many products will you have on the site when it’s launched? (A good estimate is better than no answer here!)
- How many categories and subcategories will there be on the site when it’s launched? (An approximate answer will do for now.)
- Do you want customers to be able to compare different products side by side?
- Will you be charging VAT on products?
- Do you want buyers to be able to share their purchase on Social Media?
- Do you want visitors to be able to email a page to a friend?
If you have any questions about e-commerce, online shops or Magento then please get in touch with us.