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Planning and building an online shop requires a great deal of thought and preparation.

Insight Global are highly experienced at building and managing ecommerce sites. We know the pros and cons and will first discuss with you what you want to achieve from your online shop.

However, here are a few of the things you will need to think about in preparation:

Who are you selling to?

You need to decide if you want to sell to your own country or allow people from other countries to buy. We will need to prepare country zones and add the various countries to them. 

 

What currency?

Are you going to show the products in your own currency only or do you want to show additional currencies?

VAT/TAX

Do you want to show the customer the prices includiing tax or do you want to show the tax only when a customer is checking out?

How do you intend to take Payment?

The simplest form of taking payment by credit card is using a paypal account. Create a free business paypal account and ensure it is attached to your business bank account. This takes about 1 week to do, be prepared.

However we also offer SagePay as a more professional option.

How do you intend to deliver your products?

This is probably one of the most overlooked requirements when first setting up an online shop, but it is a key element to the success of your shop.

You need to decide what you are going to charge for deliveries. In most cases the best way to work this out is to weigh your products and use a postal or courier matrix to calculate the costs.  

For example:

In UK we have the Royal Mail postage matrix up to 2kg with various price breaks depending on the weight. Then you will need to use another matrix for packages over 2kg. Then if you are sending outside of UK, you will need a European matrix and a Rest of World matrix. 

The main thing we need from you is weights for each product and then the matrix you intend to use. We will then build that into the delivery/shipping options.

Product Descriptions:

You will need to write product descriptions if you do not already have them.

Product Photographs:

The way your products are shown is vitally important if you want people to see what they are buying. Photos that are badly taken, too small or even too large can be very offputting. Additionally photos with backgounds are not ideal.  The best way is to have all your images the same size, with backgrounds removed in .png format.  We can help you with this.

Categorising Products:

If you have lots of products you may need to think about breaking them down into categories. This makes them easier to manage and easier for the customer to find.

Product Attributes:

Attributes are options that can be chosen by the customer at time of order.

Colour, Size etc. It is important for us to know at an early stage what the attribute names and options consist of.

e.g

Attribute Name: Colour

Attribute Options: Red, Green, Blue, White, Black

We can then apply any or all of the options to a product.

This should be enough information to get you thinking :)

Yes, however we prefer to bring your domain onto our servers.

 

The reason for this is that we are familiar with our servers and we know what we can deliver. Using foreign servers can be learning curve for us  and we cannot guarantee that everything we normally deliver will be available on your servers.

Absolutely! Rome wasn't built in a day.

 

We can get your site up and running with the basics and build on it as and when required.

 

We prefer to plan and implement your project in phases which can be governed by your timescales and budget.

There are running costs that you will need to budget for, firstly website hosting is renewable on a yearly basis and depending on the specification there maybe additional monthly charges for additional hosting services required as your site developes and grows.

 

We also have preventative maintenance contracts to ensure your data is completely backed up and your website is up and running.  Cost for these packages are based on the complexity of the website and the amount of data needed to be backed up.

 

For clients who don't wish to update their own website but instead leave everything to us we have fixed price solutions where specific time is allocated to you each month for updates.

Pricing very much depends on the scope of the project and because we deliver bespoke solutions we would need to understand your business and objectives in order to agree a solution and budget to meet your requirements.

Insight Global stopped building static html based websites a number of years ago and instead focuses on delivering online applications that provide powerful tools for clients to make full use of the internet.  We believe that for a website to be successful our clients need to be able to update content, add news and work with us as their website continually evolves and that the static html websites could not deliver this.