E-commerce and Websites

Your website should working for you – for lead generation or fully e-commerce enabled.

If you don’t have one, we can set one up very quickly, with a full content management system so you can update it yourself.

New websites using free software

We have built a few websites using these opensource ( = free) systems and if you need a new  website, we would be recommending WordPress. In just days you could be up and running with an e-commerce website – the only variable on how long it would take is how many pages or products you have and whether you already have all the content and images, as the data-load is the part the takes the time – but this can be done by non-technical people – or done offshore.

If you want to sell on-line you will also need need an e-commerce merchant number – and to fill in a lot of forms. Which brings us to:

Payment gateways, ecommerce and PCI compliance 

Are you taking payments on your website?  If not, you probably need to be. Setting up e-commerce is not rocket science, but it can be fiddly and time consuming, so it helps if you already know the difference between “ecom”, “moto” and what a “virtual terminal” is. Integrating Paypal is a useful option too for B2C sales – for people using mobiles it does aid conversion. 

We can help with the whole e-commerce setup. We’ve integrated Sagepay, Paypal, Bank of America, Safecharge, Paypoint – but they are basically all much the same. Filling in the PCI compliance self assessment form can also be a daunting task we can help with.

Analytics measure your website's performance

You are probably already using some kind of web analytics and it’s probably Google’s. If you are not using anything, we can set this up and show you how to check what’s going on. If your website delivers hardly any enquiries, it could b that there’s no-one visiting it. But what if you have a lot of traffic and it’s just your “contact us” form is broken?  

There are some powerful tools available – but do you know how to use them and set them up? You can’t beat a good sales funnel visualisation to see how you’re doing – but it can be a bit of a pain to set up, and to make sure all your tracking code is set up correctly.

Conversion rates try to improve

Do you know your conversion rates?  If not, you should. There’s many different ways to measure it which means it’s not easily comparable to other companies in the same sector. But if you stick to one method, then you can compare your own rates with previous periods. If you don’t know your conversion rate, then it’s not worth attempting to change your website layout, navigation or pricing, because you won’t be able to measure if it’s been a success or not. You can’t simply monitor sales volumes, as this is susceptible to outside influences – such as the state of the economy, news stories or even the weather. Trending your conversion rates is the first thing to do before making any other changes.

Prospects and abandoned baskets 

No matter what your e-commerce system is – somewhere you will have valuable data stored on your system from sales that didn’t convert. Are you using this? There are plenty of companies out their who will help with abandoned shopping basket recovery – normally on an affiliate commission basis – so it could be costing you 5 to 10% to convert someone whose data you already had. But these third party solutions are normally not as good as having your own – because your own solution will have access to all the data and can redirect the user back to the checkout screen, ready to purchase. Not only that, there’s no commission to pay.

If you can capitalise on these, it’s a simple way to to increase your conversion rates.