Website design marketing and hosting in Telford Shropshire

E-commerce, ecommerce, e-tailing it doesn’t matter how you spell or say it, it boils down to the same thing - selling online.

Online sales is big business now, reports suggest that US online retail sales will top $130 Billion with the UK and Europe trading at similar amounts. But it’s not an easy ride, gone are the days of setting up a website and making a million over night. It takes the right product with the right web strategy many years to hit the million pound turnover.

Don’t be put off though, if you can sell it on the high street then there isn’t any reason that you can’t sell it online. A lot of companies use their online presence as an backup to their bricks and mortar business, perhaps to sell through end of line stock or for promotions etc. They do this because to survive online you have to be competitively priced but you can get into price differentials between your shop and your website so selling stock that isn’t in store is sometimes a better option.

To be effective online the website management has to be slick, you need to changes prices easily and you need to add or remove product at the click of button. The best way to do this is via a database, ideally with content supplied from your own stock management software. What? You don’t have stock management software? Well all you need to do is create spreadsheets and the website can be driven from that.

Ecommerce is a powerful thing and can be adapted in many different ways… we know because we done it… and we can do it for you.

The computer that serves your website is not a computer in your office, therefore it is ‘divorced’ from your own stock management systems. In the ideal world this would not be the case, ideally you would want to serve your own website so when you change your own data so it’s correct in your office and correct on your website. This can be done however, all you do is change your data then export it in a format that can be imported into your website.

Advantages:

• It’s by far cheaper to host your site on a providers server than it is to arrange for a permanent internet connection to be installed in your office. By permanent connection we mean a ‘leased line’ or similar robust always on internet connection and not ‘Broadband’. Broadband is meant as a surfing connection and is limited in its ability to upload or serve data. Some ISP’s actually prevent you from running a mail or webserver on a broadband connection.
• The data you export from your own system contains only the data you want to display on your site, therefore no personal data is exposed as your own computer is not ‘hackable’ via your website.

Disadvantages:

• Unless you are familiar with the import process, ideally this should be done by your website designer.