Selling Online Made Easy
Set up your shop on the web today!
If you would like to sell products and take secure payments online, we can help.
Here are a few reasons to own your own shop online:
- Your shop is open for business 24hrs a day, 365 days a year
- You have access to a huge potential market
- You can increase your sales with little or no extra administration
- You can give yourself a competitive edge over your rivals
- You can gain new customers and convince existing ones to return
- You can access your customers in the comfort of their own home
Having an e-commerce site is possibly one of the best ways to make money from the Internet. And the good news is it actually involves very little extra effort on your part.
What is involved in setting one up?
In design and capability terms:
Your site must inspire trust.
You must have a shopping cart - the software equivalent of a supermarket
checkout.
You must also decide:
how many products you want to sell
how many additional features you want to offer your shoppers
how much your shopping site might expand over the next 2 to 3 years
In more detail:
To begin selling products or services online you must start with a professional looking, well designed e-commerce site. Otherwise, many visitors will simply not trust giving their credit card details to you.
To allow the users of your site to select items they would like to purchase, you need a good "shopping cart" system.
There is a huge variety of shopping cart systems, from simple scripts designed to handle just a few products, to fully rounded solutions that can handle 1,000's of products, monitor stock levels, up sell related items, and allow the site owner to update or add products through their own internet browser.
The type of e-commerce shopping cart solution we choose really depends on:
the number of products you plan to sell
how often you are likely to add or amend products
what extra features you would like
what kind of budget you have
We understand that every e-commerce shopping site is different, but look
at the exact needs of your site, before recommending a shopping cart for
you.
After all you don't want to pay for features you will never need, or worse, find that in 6 months time your site has become too popular for your e-commerce solution - meaning you will need to start again from scratch!
E-Payment
You need to set up a mechanism for taking payment. This is with a Payment Service Provider.
If you have a Merchant Account, then that's fine.
If you don't have a Merchant Account, you can set one up either with your bank, or perhaps with your payment service provider.
In more detail:
To be able to take payments online you will need to use a Payment Service Provider. These companies take the payment, do the security checks, and then when everything is cleared, pay the money into your bank. They will usually charge a set-up fee and then a small percentage on each transaction.
If you already have a Merchant Account with a bank, this is where the payment provider will put the money. If you don't have one yet go to your bank and ask for details. Banks will usually also charge a small handling fee on each transaction.
Alternatively you can set up a merchant account with some payment providers such as PayPal on Nochex. These are great if you don't want the hassle of setting up a merchant account with a bank, but if you're expecting to sell lots of products on your site, it's usually cheaper to set up a merchant account with a bank.
We can sort it all out for you!
All this shopping cart and merchant account talk can seem rather complicated, but we'll help you assess the kind of business you plan to run, and then advise you on the best solutions for your business.
