Selling online

When an online shop is working properly, the customer barely thinks about it. They find what they came for, trust the delivery date they are offered, pay in a few taps and get on with their day, and the only thing they remember is that it was easy. That ease is what turns a visitor into an order, and selling more to the same number of visitors is the cheapest growth there is, because you have already paid to get those people through the door.

Making it feel that simple takes a good deal of agreement behind the scenes. The price, the stock figure, the delivery rules, the tax and the payment all have to tell the same story, on a phone as readily as on a desktop. That is where most of our time goes, because a checkout people finish is worth more than any amount of extra traffic.

The parts that decide whether it works

Delivery is where shops can leak money, because the rules have to match what your courier actually charges you, including the surcharges for the places couriers dislike. Payment has to work on a phone at the first attempt, since a customer who has to try twice usually does not. Tax has to be right on every combination of product and destination rather than most of them. If you sell to the trade as well as the public, the shop has to know the difference.

This is the sharp edge of selling online which can lose you business when it is wrong.

Open source, rather than a percentage of everything

We recommend OpenCart and WooCommerce, which are open source (free) ecommerce platforms. It’s not because it necessarily makes it easier for us, but because the bottom line favours our clients. A hosted platform like Shopify is quick and cheap to set up, but charges you every month for as long as you trade, sometimes with a slice of each sale off the top. The open source alternative costs more to set up properly but much less to keep running, so the further you get from launch the more you profit. A shop doing steady business tends to cross over sooner than owners expect.

Moreover, by taking the open source route, your shop really is your shop. Nobody can change the terms, take a bigger cut, retire a feature you depend on or make you rebuild because a version has been retired. If you want something the platform does not do, it can be built rather than worked around.

Much of the industry has moved to hosted platforms over the past decade, which has left a lot of perfectly good open source shops with nobody who wants to look after them. That suits us.

Connecting the shop to the rest of the business

An online shop that isn’t connected to your other online business admin tools creates work rather than saving it, because somebody ends up copying and pasting. The useful version is connected to whatever else the business runs on, so that order data tags the right people on your mailing list without anybody exporting a spreadsheet, enquiries land in the system your sales people actually watch, the morning stock figures from your fulfilment centre are checked against what the shop thinks it has, and the sales report writes itself and arrives by email instead of being assembled by hand each month.

Integrations like this can save hour upon hour every month. It is also the work that dates a website least, because it is about how your business runs rather than how the pages look.

Taking on a shop somebody else built

We are happy to take on an existing ecommerce site, including ones on older versions that other firms would rather replace than learn. The first job is always to find out what is actually there, take a full copy of it, and write down how it works, because a shop is the worst possible thing to change while guessing.

From there it is usually a choice between repairing what exists and rebuilding it, and the honest answer is often the first. A shop that is trading and merely tired is rarely worth throwing away, whatever the firm quoting for a rebuild tells you.

What it costs

A shop on a standard platform is about £2,500, and one built around how your business actually works runs from £5,000 to £7,500. You can find more information, explaining what pushes a project towards the top of its price band, on our pricing page.

Where to start

Tell us what you sell and what you want the shop to do, whether that is opening one for the first time, selling to the trade as well as the public, or getting more out of the one you already have. If something specific is going wrong, a delivery calculator nobody trusts or a platform you have outgrown, tell us that as well. We will tell you what it would take and what it would cost, including when the honest answer is to repair what you have rather than replace it.

0118 950 7617 [email protected]

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