-
Do you sell online? Personal advice on e-commerce please?
I’m considering adding an online shop to our website.
I plan only to sell run of the mill print (posters, banners, mounted prints) with our USP being a "Same Day Service" where customers can collect their order same day.
This will be subject to orders being received by a cut off time, and charging a surcharge for the privilege.
I’m curious as to how others have found e-commerce? (Not eBay/Amazon)
We don’t want to sell on price but on service.
-
15 Replies
-
Hi David
E-commerce can be as simple or complicated as you want to make it, are you going to build the site yourselves?
We built our online shop using magneto there are lots of plugins available to help you with things but you will most likely need custom coding which can get very expensive if you can’t do it and have to pay someone to give you an idea a custom magneto site would start at around £8000 and you will need a vps to host it on.
Prestashop is another option not as customisable but cheaper and does not need to be hosted on a vps.
They also take a lot of time to get up and running but once they do they are a 24/7 salesman.
Have a look at our shop to give you an idea of a magneto online shop, hope this helps you.
-
I took a look at Megento, yes its very customisable, but I’ve had better success with opencart, it works with our card processor and I’ve already got some extensions that allow more user friendly uploads etc.
What is your web address Lee?
Do you charge the same online as you do over the phone or in store?
-
Hi David
Not sure if I’m alowed to post our web address if it’s ok with rob I will post it
We charge the same online as we do in store our online shop is almost like two sites one for retail (joe public) and one for our trade customers that only get the trade prices once they have loged in and we have to approve there registration so people just tring to get a trade price don’t have access.
-
Think I have found it 🙂 LinkedIn has its uses.
That’s the kind of thing I am looking achieve.
Do you get many sales through your e-shop?
-
It works well for us but when you launch your new online shop you will need to promote it hard and have good seo don’t expect to get much from organic searches for at leat 9 months, after that with good seo you should do alright again seo is not cheap if you can’t do it yourself.
-
Just looking at Magento again, think I may persevere with it as it seems to do plenty we need that opencart cannot.
I like your minimum order notice, and how you cannot upload files on a product page.
-
We just tried to make the site as easy to use as possible and to be as transparent with our prices so there are no hidden extras when you get to the payment pages.
For our artwork upload we use transfer big files this allows clients to upload files upto 20gb the customer get an email after they have placed an order with a link to our artwork upload page this can also be found in the footer menu. Customers like things that make their lives easy so simple thing like this help a lot.
I think if you build your shop on anything other than magneto you will struggle with all the feature that we use as the other options are limiting.
We are looking at offering a resellers website soon which will have all the same functionality as our online shop without the trade area for a monthly fee.
-
Yes I like it.
Out of curiosity how do you get it to display the minimum order value on the product page?
Opencart would only do it at the checkout, which was a little deceiving.
If I get chance today I will be installing Magento as it’s far more flexible and I prefer the layout of the produce pages better. 😎
-
The min order value is a bit of custom coding, there is a lot of custom code on our shop it was the only way we could get it the way we wanted.
-
No problem, we’ve a support contract on our site, so I’ll get the basics and let our web guys do the technical stuff.
It’s very different to OpenCart 😀
Thanks for your help!
-
Hi
To get Magento looking its best and fully create your own unique templates and layouts it seems that you really need some reasonable coding skills, especially PHP.
However, we have launched a few e-commerce websites using the following tool that allows you to create custom themes / templates without any coding at all – just select options from drop downs etc. It wasn’t free but it was worth the £50-£60 we paid.
Cheers
Macky -
We use http://themeforest.net/ for templates when designing websites (wordpress, magento etc etc) a lot easier them CCS / PHP / HTML coding from sratch.
-
Sure your website guys will sort things for you David but one of the most important things to take into account now is how the site looks & operates under a multitude of different platforms especially with more & more people using mobile media to view & order from websites.
-
I’m just experimenting with a default theme at the moment. I want something clean and straightforward. Most of the themes I’ve seen are rammed full of banners and stuff.
Will probably roll it out in stages.
-
Hi david, we have two websites. Our regular everyday site and an online print and display shop we built ourselves in shopify. We found shopify very easy to use, and it comes with all sorts of apps and add ons. There is a a calculator app available so your customer just enters the size of their print, poster etc and the calculator works out the total price based on the data you enter when setting the shop up. It also has an upload artwork box, customisable emails it will automatically send to your customers and links with quickbooks for invoicing etc. Not badly priced either, the first two weeks is free so you can get your site set up and after that its £18 per month. It comes with £100 of google adwords credit and £50 of facebook advertising vouchers to help you along with getting found.
Log in to reply.
