Online Shop - eCommerce

Sell Everywhere – Be Seen and Be Shopped

Customer expectations for how and when they buy products have changed substantially over the past few years. Multi-channel selling was once limited to managing direct sales, a call center and possibly a partner channel. With eCommerce this has been expanded and refined to include online shops. Online shopping now accounts for a significant market share of the retail industry.

There are significant advantages of having an online shop website:

• Your shop is open 24/7
• You are open to business from a distance and potentially around the world
• It is easy to make price changes, run special offers, add new items
• Customers can shop incredibly quickly
• Online shops have a much lower cost base to their bricks and mortar counterparts
• You can build a valuable customer database for future marketing activities.

The fact is that more and more people expect to shop online more and more often. If you work in any sort of business where your revenue is driven by exchanging money for an easily deliverable commodity, you have to ask yourself the question "can I afford not to be online?".

How easy is it to get an online shop?

There are a variety of Ecommerce systems available from free "off the shelf" solutions to individually developed bespoke options. Which one you choose will depend on what sort of items you sell and how big the shop needs to be.

Apart from transactional capabilities online shops need a database of product, product availability, prices and delivery options.

At SME Websites we develop a database integrated website from either your existing database, a custom built ecommerce database, to provide all your potential customers with the information and details they need about your products.

Having developed the site we then integrate it with Roman Cart. Choosing Roman Cart as the processing engine allows us full flexibility in designing the site and displaying your products, then simply using the Roman Cart power to drive the checkout process.

If you have a PayPal account, and wish to take payments through it, Roamn Cart is free to use. The only ongoing cost for Roman Cart is when you wish to add credit card transactions, for which you will need to have merchant status from your bank, or other such supplier.

If you would like a no obligation consultation regarding an online shop, or ecommerce contact us at info@smewebsites.ltd.uk to discuss your website requirements.