Making the move from selling products in a shop to online has major advantages for businesses, often leading to increased profitability and decreased costs. This is a guide about taking a shop online, including things to consider when creating it and the consequences of getting things wrong. If you are considering hiring a third party to build an online shop for you, then this guide should help you know the important questions to ask.

The benefits of selling online are numerous. The costs associated with setting up an online shop compared to a real one are miniscule. There’s no shop assistant to pay, and no expensive high-street premises to rent. Online retail reduces order-processing costs, with online orders going straight to your orders database from your website. Rather than selling to anyone who walks down the high street, your market is global with an online shop. You are now open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can receive fast payments from people who would not have necessarily entered a high street retail outlet.

Online shops work best for businesses with well-defined products and services that can be sold without human intervention at the sales level. It is much easier if all customers pay the same price for a product and service, and it’s important that the delivery is reliable.

The basic requirements of an online shop are fairly obvious, and a simple setup should allow you to sell a range of products with photos, descriptions and prices as well as an online order form or shopping basket.

The Website

Ideally, you want a professional looking, well organised and maintained website in order to have an effective presence in the online retail market. Website design should be simplistic, so as not to confuse your visitors. It’s worth considering how the site will connect with the shopping cart system, and it’s important to guide visitors around your shop, to ensure they stay and browse as long as possible, increasing the chances of that all-important sale.

It’s usually best to enlist the help of a professional web designer to do the initial site design, but ideally it should be designed in a way which makes it easy for you to update the site. This means that the design firm or designer should employ a type of content management system (CMS) which you can get your head around; otherwise you need to learn the web design software package for yourself and update it manually. If you have to call your website designer every time you want to change your website then it is going to cost you a fortune. It’s important that the designer knows the site is going to be handed over, and that it needs to be maintained by someone without the same level of technical knowledge and experience.

If you are planning on having a large online catalogue then ensure that you have a designer who has a good experience of database design. Organising products so that visitors can quickly find what they are looking for is often more tricky than you think.

Tags: Websites