E-commerce Web Design

Online Shopping Cart Development

So you want to sell your products online? I hope you have thought this through very thoroughly. Please take 5 minutes to read this page to get some proper understanding of what challenges you are about to face:

Online Shops create a nice income stream and work from home if you really put time and effort into your e-commerce website. Before contacting a website design company, you need to have everything ready. The web designer will be asking you for all your product images ad you need to have all product information readily available before the web designing even starts. The web designer will not know the product titles, descriptions, prices, shipping costs, nor will he be able to help you find an image for each product. Therefore you can see that if you are planning to start-up an online shop, you need to put a lot of preparation in it, otherwise the website will still be unfinished after 1 year. The more products you are planning to have in your web-catalog, the more work is involved.

I recommend that you start with adding 50 - 100 products to your website and later add new items one by one individually as you source something new and  make a new photo shot or get access to the image.

E-commerce Website Elements

The price for an e-commerce can vary from $1000- $5000 and that all depends on the following:

1. What shipping methods you want? This is one of the most difficult tasks you will have to go through. You don't have to do it alone. We can help you find the best solution. Let me illustrate why this is pretty tricky n a nutshell: The more time and money you invest into this area, the happier your clients will be later. If you are lazy or you want to save money on this part and just offer a flat rate shipping price (e.g. free shipping Australia wide for orders above $150 or $15 shipping for anything anywhere) then you will rather be upsetting many customers. For some customers that live in the same city your business is located, the shipping will be too expensive, and if you offer free shipping then you might have a loss of profit if some orders come from Perth or Darwin or somewhere outback. Therefore there is only 1 good solution for shipping, and that's a custom calculator that can calculate by post code and weight. Australia Post is not the cheapest solution so you will also have to explore other courier options in advance and find the one that is cheap and suits your business the most. Then you will have to ask your web designer to develop a custom calculator according to your couriers price list (that you have already on a spreadsheet ready per postcode/weight class), and you also have to know the weight for all your products...sounds difficult? Well it is! but this is a one time job and once your website is ready, you never have to go through all this again and it ill pay off.
2. What payment methods will you offer? Just PayPal? Well that sure is the cheapest way but not really the best impression for your business. However if you only have a very small budget then PayPal will have to do the job until you can afford to grow a bit more. In saying that, if you only have a small budget, how will you advertise this website, and how will it ever start making daily sales? So you better call and talk to us free of charge, and later think this through before taking the next step.

E-commerce Content Management Systems

The systems we use, just like with all other non-ecomerce website are open source codes that you own after we deliver the website to you. The CMS's (Content Management Systems) we use mostly are: Magento (Magento CMS is our favorite and one of the world leading e-commerce systems), Prestashop, Opencart, Zencart, and Virtuemart. There are no monthly fees, no binding contracts and the code and design are fully in your ownership with no smoking mirrors.

Many web design companies you will ask for a website quote might offer you much cheaper website price than us, but beware! This is where most people get trapped into monthly maintenance fees and/or will never own their website source code; meaning that they can never just change to a different website company, plus they must pay for a lifetime e.g. $25-$50 per month for the website. Another downside of this will be that if extra functions are needed down the track, that the cost of adding simple added functions will be charged at extremely high prices and you can't go comparing these prices with another company anymore because you have locked yourself down to 1 company forever and now they can charge you whatever they feel like. So beware not to fall for those super-cheap website offers. They can; no, they WILL become after 5 years a very expensive price for a simple online shop that seemed so cheap to start off with. This miscalculation and a quick acceptance for misleading cheap offers is caused due to inexperience and lack of research (such as reading an informative web page like this).