Built to sell.
Whether your products are physical or digital, you can advertise these on your E-Commerce website and make them available to purchase to your target market, wherever they’re located in the world. The greatest benefit of E-Commerce is that you do not need to be ‘present’ for the sale to be processed. Orders can be received whilst you’re sleeping and you can wake up to a bundle of new orders from excited new customers.
E-Commerce represents an excellent opportunity for a new revenue stream for your business. It’s suitable for almost any product or purchasable service - physical or digital, so you’re not restricted to just listing physical products like Amazon. Perhaps you want to offer a monthly service as an accountant or a fitness instructor? Well, you can build this into an E-Commerce website and receive regular recurring monthly payments from your happy clients.
In the world of E-Commerce, more and more of your customers will be using their mobile phone or tablet to browse the Internet and to do their online shopping. In fact, up to 80% of the visitors to your website will be using a mobile or tablet device. So, it’s extremely important that your website is designed responsively - meaning that the content resizes to suit the size of the screen on which it is being viewed. This helps users on smaller devices to enjoy and engage with your E-Commerce website, whilst also ensuring that they have a clear and logical experience when navigating through your website.
Which E-Commerce Technology?
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that extends the software into a full E-Commerce platform. It’s a great solution for most E-Commerce websites, bringing the benefits of WordPress to your E-Commerce website.
WooCommerce is easy to use and learn, so ideal as a solution for business owners who want to get up and running with their E-Commerce website quickly.
We recommend WooCommerce websites for most of the E-Commerce projects that we work on. It's more than capable of doing all of the things that Magento can do.
Magento
Magento is an open source E-Commerce platform originally released in 2008. It has a good following online with a large number of store owners and developers.
As of 2018, Magento has been acquired by Adobe (for $1.68b) and is likely to have some strong integration into Adobe's platforms moving forwards.
We typically will recommend Magento as a good platform to store owners who have many thousands of products and who need a dedicated platform with specialist features.
Our Approach to E-Commerce Websites
Step 1
Discovery
Your project kicks off with the Discovery stage. We explore your requirements to establish the brief for your e-commerce project. We’ll take time to understand your business and your ‘why’. We’ll consider your audience and their needs.
Step 2
Sitemap
The next step is to create a Sitemap, which is a simple architecture laying out all of the pages and their relationship to each other on your website. The Sitemap allows everyone to have an overview of how your new website fits together.
Step 3
Prototype
Now we move to the browser and we put together a prototype of your website. This will typically consist of the home page and a couple of inner pages. This shows the initial layout of elements on the page and is in black and white.
Step 4
Design
This is where the magic starts to happen. We’ll flesh out your new web design project with splashes of colour and start creating the website around your content. Again, we’ll have your audience in mind when it comes to designing your site.
Step 5
Develop
During the development stage, this is where we carry out any of the more technical tasks. We’ll review the website and test it thoroughly with you. Any final tweaks are then made to the website, getting it ready to launch.
Step 6
Launch
Your new e-commerce website is ready to launch! We’ll help you to get it live and provide full training. We support your website launch with our highly recommended WordPress Care Plans. Magento care plans are also available.