Setting Up an Online Shop

With the growing popularity in online shopping, many traditional retailers are realising it makes sense to sell their products online as well as in the high street.  But just how easy is it to set up an online shop, and how much time does it take to maintain?    Here are some guidelines along with some recent examples...

There are a few simple rules to follow when building an online shop:

• Site navigation structure should be kept as simple as possible - you don't want your site visitors to lose their way in a maze of pages. 
• Avoid 'off-the-shelf' shop packages which often generate confusing page titles comprising a string of letters, numbers, and symbols - this can confuse search engine spiders, making your pages difficult or even impossible to find.   
• Always keep the buying process as simple and obvious as possible - for example, you don't want people clicking away because they can't figure out how much the postage will cost
• Make sure you can easily keep your site updated with new products - you don't want to have to pay someone every time you need to make changes to the site
• Choose your payment gateway carefully - some charge high monthly fees so make sure your sales will justify the cost

Football Gifts and Souvenirs http://www.footballgiftshop.co.uk .  In this example, the customer wanted an online shop for their range of football gift items and football souvenirs.  As their stock is always changing, they needed to be able to keep the site updated themselves with minimum fuss.  Although they currently focus on 6 teams (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester Utd, Tottenham Hotspur, and West Ham) they want to be able to add more teams to the range over the next few months.  So again, it's important they can easily add extra pages to their site without having to incur additional costs.  We designed and built the site within a few days then added all the content to the pages (the customer could have done this themselves if preferred).  Then we connected up their payment system, in this case PayPal, and added the prices and postage details to the product pages.  Adding more products to the site is simple and takes just a few minutes - and the system automatically monitors stock levels.   More importantly, the site is already scoring high page rankings on Google which suggests it will be a great success.  And with the help of the Immediasite Visitor Tracking tools, the site owner can fine-tune the content of the site to attract more and more traffic.

Artistica Windsor http://www.artisticawindsor.com/ .  This site shows the importance of effective optimisation - something we pay close attention to as we build each site.  The customer already had an online shop (http://www.artisticaonline.com) which unfortunately wasn't performing well - it was almost impossible to find in an online search.  The reasons?  The system that had been used to build the site threw up some bizarre page titles which only served to confuse the search engines.  Because the site contained many pages of products we decided that, rather than starting from scratch, we would build http://www.artisticawindsor.com/ as a means of directing traffic through to the existing shop site.  Effectively we've created a highly-optimised website (with plenty of keywords and search terms included in the text) and linked each page through to the online shop.  This means that someone searching for a gift on Google might find a page from the 'new' site which in turn will lead them to the actual shopping page for that product on the 'old' site.

If you are interested in talking to us about selling online in more detail, either call us on 0845 345 4005 or complete the enquiry form below: 

Thank you for your interest. A member of the Immediasite team will contact you shortly for further discussion.