E-Commerce

Setting up an e-commerce store can be a daunting undertaking. In addition to your offline tasks of manufacture, managing stock levels, and fulfilling orders, your online store is crucial: it’s your public face to the World. It needs to look great, be designed to encourage orders, display your products effectively and take payment securely.

E-Commerce Platform

Your first decision is which e-commerce platform to use.  Online platforms that are ‘hosted’, such as Shopify or Squarespace are one option.  They own the store, and you pay fees either monthly, or per transaction.  Your options to develop your store however are limited, and you are tied into their service.

A website of your own is another option. You can develop and change your site as often as you like.  If you wanted to add a new feature to your checkout for example, this is achievable when you have full control over your store.  You own the website and can move it from one web host to another, should you wish.

We work with clients to advise on, and implement the best solution for their requirements.  Depending on the store size, we often work with WooCommerce, which is an e-commerce add-on for WordPress.  WooCommerce has been developed over many years and is very refined to make it easy for store owners to manage their product listings, and orders that come through their store.  Because WooCommerce is ‘open source’, there are no ongoing licensing fees, and there is a very large community of developers and companies who develop useful ‘add-ons’, whether that is a personalised product option, or tools to help store owners manage orders.

Store Design

Considerations include both visual design, to match a store owner’s logo and branding, and also functional design which dictates the customer journey and to encourage orders.

Options are available for budgets of all sizes. Start-up stores may wish to cut costs by implementing an ‘off-the-shelf’ design, with customisations to match their branding.  Established businesses may prefer a bespoke option that offers the opportunity to have a completely unique design.

Payments

Security and payments are often the element that store owners are most apprehensive about when launching an e-commerce store.  Larger stores may choose to process payments themselves, although this in turn raises the prospect of becoming ‘PCI compliant’, which is a significant undertaking in terms of cost, process and responsibility.

A more common approach is to use a ‘payment processor’ to take payments on your behalf.  This may be PayPal, Stripe or WorldPay for example.  By integrating a payment processor who is already PCI accredited, your store does not handle payments or card details, reducing your liability and risk.

We can work with store owners to implement their payment processors of choice into their checkout, making the process worry-free, leaving you to focus on running your store.

Case Study

Love Frankie

An edgy and creative lighting and interiors e-commerce store.

We’ve worked with the Love Frankie team for many years, through a number of website designs and iterations to help support their fantastic growth.

Read More