eCommerce Development

How much for an eCommerce website?

An eCommerce website means different things to different people. To us it means the following features as standard. Every project is unique, so fill out our enquiry form » on how your project differs and we’ll quote.

• Our websites are built using WordPress. Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call home. WordPress is the world’s most popular Content Management System for changing website text, adding new pages, blogging and tweaking content. It allows people like you to easily make big changes to your website without the need to learn programming. It is widely supported and offers many advanced features out of the box. Best of all it’s open source so it’s free to use. Allowing you to make changes if you want to or you may prefer to get us to quote on an item by item basis.
• A New Design not an off-the-shelf one. Design is not the icing on the cake where you just choose a colour and a font. In fact it has careful consideration of form and composition that aims to evoke the right psychological and emotional response ».
• The project time scales are less than 3 weeks for our involvement. As we don’t know how busy you are please add reasonable time for your involvement such as supplying content, reviews and any changes you add to the project.
• Secure check out, credit card processing, storing customer’s data and transactional reports handled by PayPal‘s website. As sensitive customer data is only taken and stored on the PayPal checkout site this frees you from very expensive dedicated SLL/HTTPS hosting and you benefit from their constant updates to security and compliance with the law.
• No Monthly Hosting Fees From Us. We recommend budget or feature rich hosting with dedicated hosting giants giving you large support teams keeping it reliably running 24/7 on fast secure powerful servers. Combined with our dedicated designers giving you the personal local service whose focus in on making your site look and function great. Expect to pay them (e.g. GoDaddy, 123-Reg, FastHosts etc) about £5 per month for reasonable hosting. Minimum hosting requirements for a WordPress site are Linux (with mod_rewrite and GD turned on), PHP 4.3+ and MySQL 4.1.2+.
• We don’t charge a monthly license fee for our eCommerce software.
• Unlimited products in your shop, only limited by your database/website file size allowance. We will populate your shop with 10 products to get you started.
• Website submitted to the main search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. Note the rest often buy their databases from these.
• Includes Search Engine Optimisation. For the best chance of being indexed highly by the search engines.
• Built with Google Analytics. You can track it’s success.
• Testing in multiple browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari. For the most consistent user experience in the most error free way possible.
• We proof check your text for typos, grammar and to implement sales techniques. Other designers will use your text as supplied.
• Compliance with W3C Accessibility Standards. To reach the widest possible audience.
• Conformance to W3C XHTML Validation. To follow industry best practices.
• Includes minor amendments and we’ll quote for excessive ones. Note some companies charge for all changes.

The interface will contain the following items:

• Your company logo.
• A Basket Summary including total price, total number of items and a view basket button.
• Main navigation to Home, Customer Services, Blog and Contact. Side navigation listing product categories. Footer links to Sitemap and Legal.
• A search form that searches for products.

The website will contain the following pages:

• Home page containing the following elements:
  • A paragraph on why people want to use you.
  • Shows the main categories.
• Customer Service page with a few paragraphs explaining issues such as shipping, returns process, size guides, your terms and conditions etc.
• Category page and the search results page list products. Each product has their title, thumbnail image, price and they link through to their Product page.
• Product page shows the product’s title, description, price, a larger image and a button to add it to the basket.
• Basket page shows an itemised summary listing items, prices, vat and flat rate shipping. With functionality to change quantity, delete products and a button to proceed to checkout. The checkout button will send the customer’s order to PayPal. The following steps are on the PayPal secure website with it’s familiar branding that reassures customers that buying from you is genuine, trustworthy, safe and secure.
  • The customer now enters a range of details such as delivery address, billing address and payment. PayPal then securely handles the card processing.
  • Once their payment has been confirmed PayPal will send the customer and you an email confirming the order has been placed.
  • You can then login to PayPal to manage the order and many other things too, such as issuing order tracking statements, printing packing slips or delivery labels, manage refunds, download transaction history for your tax return and most importantly transfer funds to your bank.
• Confirmation page appears after completing the PayPal process and contains a short thank you statement.
• Blog page contains a list of the latest posts which link through to the full Article Pages. You post the articles with the WordPress Content Management System. The latest post page is also used for viewing search results, viewing post categories, viewing tagged posts, viewing posts by year|month|day and viewing posts by author.
• Contact page containing your contact details, an embedded interactive Google Map pointing to where your location is and an email form (capturing name, email and message).
• Sitemap page listing all pages on the site.
• Legal page containing standard website legal information such as privacy statement, copyright statement and website terms & conditions.

You provide us:

• Text content.
• Any source visual assets for the design such as your logo, accreditation logos, photography, illustrations etc. There maybe an additional charge and time scales if we have to create or find these.
• Product details and photos of the first 10 products including a list of the product categories.