eCommerce Website Design Newcastle

Online sales for the UK in the coming year are expected to reach £42.7bn in 2010 (£38bn online in 2009, or an average of £1,102 per shopper, according to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR)), and that's a conservative estimate; as more people world-wide gain access to the Internet, eCommerce and online shopping will become second nature to consumers and businesses alike.

With a tailor-made ecommerce web designs, you are guaranteed to receive a robust, stable, secure, and easily updateable website, to sell your products and services to the world.

There are various options when it comes to taking payments for your products or services on the web, such as PayPal, WorldPay. These are not the ideal solution though, and unfortunately can reflect in the amount of sales. Customers want to make purchases from the same site they have been on, and they tend not to carry a purchase through if they are taking away from the site.

To be able to take onsite credit cards, you will require a merchant account, plus the use of a third party processor such as SagePay, plus an SSL certificate from either VeriSign or Thawte.

Basically what happens is this.

1. Customer adds an item to their basket.
2. Customer clicks check out
3. Customer either logs in or registers/creates and account
4. Customer confirms order details/shipping etc
5. Customer Enters credit card details then clicks submit.
6. At this point, we send fully encrypted details to sage pay for validation and if required, your customer will be prompted to enter their Verified by Visa or MasterCard Secure Code password on their card issuer's page
7. Sage Pay return with various messages depending upon whether the card has been authorised/declined etc.
8. If the card was authorised, we send the customer to a thank you page, with a unique order number, they also get a confirmation email, and the you gets the same.
9. If the card was declined, or not accepted for any other reason, we inform them of this and ask them to try another card. 

Sage Pay provide full reporting system, so that all payments/refunds/cancelations etc can be tracked. Your system also holds unique SagePay transaction numbers, so that the 2 systems tie together.

So, what does your system do?

All my eCommerce websites are developed from the ground up to be as Search Engine friendly as possible right from the start, and I always give my clients the ability to update the essential meta data for all products, categories and pages. My eCommerce packages have an extensive list of features available which are highly customizable; here’s a list of what my ecommerce sites do consist of:

Product Catalog

Unlimited products

Unlimited Categories and Secondary Categories.

 

Unlimited and flexible Product Options

Specify as many (or as few) options as you like for each and every product. (Size, Colour, Type etc)

 

HTML enriched WYSIWYG editor

Category image/description with Browser-based Product Image Upload.

 

Multiple product images

Product Customisation

 

Product accessories

Flexible Product Display based on number of options.

 

Up-Sell Linking. Show related "other products of interest" on the Products Details page

Enable/Disable products and categories

 

Featured products

Search for products by Categories, Secondary Categories, and Keywords.

 

Ability to change the display order of Products, Categories & Secondary Categories,

Flexible Product Display based on number of options

 

Flexible discount features allow many on-sale and coupon discount options. Either by single product, or by groups of products

 

Cart and Customer Support

User session based shopping cart

User registrations and login

 

Dedicated Customer Account Login

Customers can search & browse personal order history

 

Real time order tracking

Multiple customer types with unique pricing for every customer type

 

Memberships and special pricing

Edit product options in cart/wishlist/Gift registry wishlist

 

Wish list

 

Inventory Management & Merchandising

Product quantity maintenance

Customized messages for quantity levels

 

Discount coupon codes and gift certificates

Flexible discount features allow many on-sale and coupon discount options. Either by single product, or by groups of products.

 

Full inventory control

Out of Stock Messages

 

Quantity discounts

Retail and wholesale price based upon customer type

 

Clearance items & sale items

Easy to use Product, Inventory, Customer, Order Control and stock control.

 

Flexible Inventory Tracking - enable and disable backorders at any time

 

Shipping and Tax Calculation

Super Flexible Shipping!

Custom-defined delivery methods

 

Dial in shipping by Flat Rate, Order Weight, Order Destination, or a combination of these.

Promotional “free shipping” coupons to your customers

 

Handle international, domestic and local shipping

Multiple Sales Tax Configurations for Local, International and Regional Districts

 

Supports UK VAT

Customisable VAT & shipping fees depending on client’s location

 

Payment Gateway

Online payment system using Sage Pay (previously PROTX) integrated into your own website, i.e., your customer does not leave your site to make a payment

Implementation of 3D secure (if required). More info available here.

 

Consultancy for payment gateway selection

Authorised SagePay partner

 

Sales Management

Full admin features to view:
Number of orders
Number of customers
Total sales

Searchable order data

View orders and process them – set order status, order notes, tracking ID etc

View Customer details

 

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimized pages

* Customisable Search engine friendly URLs

 

Custom META tags for every Product, Category & Secondary Categories

Ability to add introduction and body text for Category & Secondary Categories

SEO: Content is king!

With the vast majority of website's design and developed on the web, the actual code structure of the website is never optimised for search engines. What does this mean? Basically, a normal website is structured like this:

1. Header goes first (along with any top navigation)
2. Left hand navigation
3. Your products and content
4. Footer is last

For SEO this is not ideal. When a search engine comes and spiders your website, it reads from the top of the code downwards and the above structure creates problems by adding way to much code before the actual content on the page; the important part.

When a search engine comes to your website, you want it to read the actual content of your page before it reads any of your navigational elements, so for all of my sites, I use the following structure (and some jiggery pokery) to serve the content to search engine first.

1. H1 tag
2. Products and content and all other heading tags
3. Left navigation
4. Header and top navigation
5. Footer

Now when a search engine visits your website, the content is served straight away, and it doesn't have to 'truge' through lines of code before it can read the actual products and content.Also, with a great deal of websites, images are used as links; for my sites, I not only use images, but also the name of the products/pages, much better for SEO as anchor links count not only from external websites, but also within your own website, and can count towards individual pages/sections page rank.

* URL rewriting is a method of converting a dynamic URL such as /products/product-page.asp?ID=1 into a much more SEO friendly URL; /products/product-name. It also helps when a user wants to bookmark your page, as the URL is very descriptive, compared to a dynamic URL.

If you would like to read more about how you can sell our goods & services online, you can do so here.