e-Commerce Package
from £1200
Just about every business that sells, can now sell online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
With very few overheads and labour resources required to run an online shop compared with a real shop, e-Commerce stores are becoming increasingly profitable and more mainstream. Your website can act as a full-time salesman. Not only that, but it can also look after your stock levels and warn you when they are low, send automated emails to people who purchase from your store and even keep track of your visitor statistics.
With more and more people becoming comfortable with online media and with constantly advancing technologies, the e-commerce world is only going to grow. Setting up a shop online has become a necessity for most successful companies, whether they are selling physical products, digital products or services.
But that’s all just marketing speak – what can I actually get?
You’re right it is. This is what can be included in the e-Commerce Package:
- Ability to add products
We realise there is little point running your own online business if you have to contact somebody else every time you want to add a new product or edit the details of an old one. So with this package you add your own. You can upload your own photos, set your own prices, set optional parameters such as sizes and colours. You can even link them to related products. Not bad eh.
- Related products feature
- Customer accounts
Allow your customers to create an account in order to speed up their shopping experience and even save items for potential purchase. This will help develop customer loyalty and also provide vital marketing opportunities. Check out our HTML Email section for ideas on how you can follow this up.
- Product size options
Set various product sizes each product. You can even set the price to change depending on the size chosen.
- Cross-browser compatible website
Building a website that looks and functions identically across all major browsers is an extremely difficult thing to achieve. Every browser interprets CSS slightly differently, so as web designers, we often end up writing extra code just to correct issues in specific browsers. Just about every one of these designers will cite IE6 as being a major pain in the ass.
Fortunately, we’ve encountered a hell of a lot of these browser issues and are getting pretty good at correcting them.
- Up to 20 email accounts
If you don’t already have them, we can set up up to 20 email addresses to go with your website.
Example:
- john@youdomain.co.uk
- jane@yourdomain.co.uk
- jim@yourdomain.co.uk
- info@yourdomain.co.uk
- hello@yourdomain.co.uk
- etc
- etc
- Contact forms
- Interactive map
If you run a business that requires customers or clients to physically visit you, it is extremely helpful to provide an interactive map to make the process that much easier. With a map users can zoom in and out and move it around until they’ve got their bearings.
- Search engine submission
Once we’ve finished building your site we’ll submit it to all of the major search engines so that it can be found by your customers and clients.
We’ve seen a lot of companies offer to submit clients’ websites to hundreds of search engines, but we suggest you take these promises with a pinch of salt. Although the figures are hard to define and are regularly changing, currently approximately 96% of the UK search engine market share is made up of just 5 search engines: Google (with a staggering 88%), Yahoo (with around 5%), Bing, Live and Ask. You dont’ need to submit your site to every single search engine out there. Once the big boys like Google and Yahoo pick up your site, it will be naturally indexed by the others. But this is not something you will need to worry about as we do it for you :)
- Shop statistics and visitor tracking
It’s important to keep an eye on how people use your website once it is live. Are they visiting the pages you expected? Are they skipping important info? Are your visitors using old software or new? All of these things should have an effect on how you use and build upon your site. We can keep track of these and other stats for you and we can also give you access to view them yourself. For a small fee we can put together a document on what the stats mean and how to interpret them if you are unsure. Contact us for details.
- Coupon codes/Gift cards
An excellent way to improve customer loyalty and promote your brand is to offer promotional deals and gift cards. With our e-Commerce system you can do just this. You can manage it all through the admin system and email them directly to the customer. You can set up permanent gift cards or ones that expire on a certain date.
- Order management admin
Keep track of your customer purchases through our e-Commerce admin system. With it you can view the status of any order and manually change them if need be. You’ll have records of all customer contact details, be able to manage stock levels and view stats on how well your products are selling.
- Product colour options
Let users choose between any colours of your products you choose to offer. You can also set different prices depending on the colour…if you really want to.
- Social media icons
- Integrated Twitter feed
- Rotating image header
- Photo gallery
A photo gallery is an excellent way to display your portfolio work if you are a photographer, graphic designer, web designer, artist etc. With our CMS Package we can give you the functionality to create your own photo galleries for whatever you see fit.
- Password protected content
Sometimes you may want to create content that is only accessible to certain people or paying customers. With our CMS Package you can easily create private and password protected content and only give out passwords to those that you wish to see it.
- User management
User management is a useful feature if there is more than one person contributing to the content on your site. You can set up different roles depending on what access rights you want to give to people. For example, you can add editors, authors, contributors or subscribers, or even set up some custom roles.
- Basic website user guide
We know not everyone is completely comfortable using a content managed system from the off. So as standard, we’ll write up a customised user guide that’s tailored specifically to your website. We’ll include everything you need to know for the day-to-day running and management of it and we’ll even drop in some useful tips to speed up your productivy as you get used to using the system. We like to please.
- Multiple product images
Users will always want to see your physical products from more than one angle or at a different zoom length. Our e-Commerce package allows you to upload multiple photos of your product so you can go mad with shots of the front, back, inside, outside, close-ups or miles away. It’s entirely up to you.
- Customer wishlist
Gives the customer the ability to create their own list of favourite products and save it. This can be useful for encouraging repeat business and customer loyalty.
- Commenting on products
- Inventory tracking
Keep track of your stock and optionally display it on your website. With our e-Commerce Package you can even set it to email you a reminder when your stock falls below a certain level.
- Fully customised and unique website
At WHD, we pride ourselves on our design skills and creativity. We strive to give every website we build it’s own character and unique appearance.
- Up to 15 pages
With the eCommerce Package you can have up to 15 pages of content created by us. The beauty of this package, however, is that it allows you to add more pages very easily.
Why is this useful?
Well, for starters you won’t need to contact us and pay for minor tweaks to your content – you will be able to do them yourself. You can also run your own news or blog section to keep people up to date with what you are up to. This can be a really useful tool for your business as it allows you get information out quickly and to a lot of people with very little effort.
If there is other functionality that you would like included with your eCommerce Package, feel free to get in touch and ask about it.
- Search facility
Offers the user the opportunity to search your site for the info they are looking for. This is especially useful if you run a blog or news section where there is a lot of archived data.
- Editable content
A content management system allows you to update any of your content as easily as if you were working in Microsoft Word. Our CMS uses a WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to style your content as you go. There is also a live preview option so you can see what your new content looks like before setting it live.
- Blog/News section
A blog or news section is becoming an increasingly important tool to business owners and individuals alike. Blogs can help your business develop a personality and character which is important in forming a connection with users. Similarly, a news section works very well in gaining people’s trust and presenting your business in a professional light.
With our CMS Package you add your own blog posts or news as often as you like and all of it will be archived and accessible through your site. It is worth noting that if you are considering this feature, you would be helping out your readers by offering them a search facility as well. All you need to do is ask :)
- 1 hour training session
If we have built you a particularly complex site and you if think you’ll need it, we can arrange for a one-hour sit-down training session to take you through the ins and outs of your website and how to get the best out of it. Couple this with our standard customised user guide that we create for each eCommerce Package website, and you shouldn’t have too many problems!
Please note – the features above are all various possibilities that can be included and do not all come as standard. Contact us with some details of the vision you have for your shop and we’ll put together a quote for you.
Anything else?
To ensure the smooth running of your site and to keep it happy and healthy, we include a maintenance package with every e-Commerce website for a monthly fee. Maintenance is essential because of the amount of upkeep and continual optimisation that needs to be done to the back-end of the site. Maintenance is your safety net. Each monthly fee is tailored to your needs and can be discussed during the initial meeting.
Maintenance includes:
- Monthly database backups
The database is what stores all of the info in your website. We make periodic backups of your data just in case anything happens to go wrong with the site so that we can restore it all if needed. Regular backups are an essential part of owning any website and we do this to ensure you always have a safety net should the worst come to the worst. Imagine the pain of losing all the contact details for your customers!
- Monthly database optimisation
Over time and as your website grows, it becomes harder and harder to maintain and can easily spiral out of control if you don’t keep an eye on it. Regularly optimising your database will ensure your website runs as quickly and smoothly as possible, whilst keeping your data organised at the same time and clearing out any unnecessary bloat.
- Regular file backups
Along with your database, it is essential to keep backups of your website files as these are used to construst your site and house all of the data. We do this at regular intervals to ensure we can always revert to slightly older versions if we need to.
- Security updates/improvements
The web is an ever-changing world and it is important to keep up with it in order to keep your website safe and happy. When we find out about new security updates that are available, we will install them as quickly as possible.
- Broken link checking
If you are running a website that incorporates a blog or news section, or any kind of regularly changing/increasing content, it is very easy for links and dead ends to arise. We periodically spider your entire site for these broken links and mend them straight away. There’s nothing more frustrating than page not found!
- CMS and plugin upgrades
E-Commerce websites sometimes need an entire upgrade of the CMS that powers them in order to bring in new features, fix bugs or security issues and for the sake of general improvement. Every upgrade to the CMS should make the way you use and interact with your website better, easier and most importantly – safer.
Complex websites also often require the use of external addons or plugins for enhanced functionality. These plugins can be updated quite often if the owner has made changes such as bug fixes, security hole fixes and speed optimisations (just like with the CMS above), so it is important to keep up. After all, every improvement in these plugins adds a little improvement to your site.
- Continual SEO
Search engine optimisation is an enormous subject and is a little too large to be discussed in detail in this little box. Everybody wants to be number 1 in Google…so naturally it’s an extremely competitive market. We would never be so presumtuous as to suggest that we can get you in that spot for any given search term – and we suggest that you are wary of anybody that does. However, we will optimise your site as and when we can and at any opportunity to increase your chances of rising up the rankings under certain terms. We have a good working relationship with all of our clients so we also promote them through various social media platforms for a little marketing boost whenever the opportunity arises.
Optional services include:
- Custom Analytics report
Trawling through hundreds of facts, figures and charts to get to the good stuff can be time-consuming and sometimes fruitless. We have a good idea of the kind of information people tend to want from their statistics and can put together a simple but useful document for you to save you some time. These reports are from £30 each.
- Extra custom pages
- Image editing/sourcing
Sometimes our clients aren’t always sure what kind of imagery would suit their website, have trouble sourcing them themselves, or simply want something a little more bespoke. Fortunately we spend our days collecting info about where to get the best images and also enjoy a spot of image editing when we get the chance. Contact us if you need some help with any these issues. We charge £30 an hour for image editing and sourcing.
Ok I’m sold, how do we get started?
First off, we need to sit down with you and talk through what you’re going to be selling, how many different products you’ll be offering and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can use our contact form to send us some details about what you’re looking for and we’ll get back to you.
