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Do I need an E-Commerce website for my business?

E-Commerce Websites • 2nd Nov, 15 • 0Comments

 
 
There are many ways to set up your business to sell online and in fact there are supports to help businesses get an e-commerce site online.  To support small Irish businesses to enhance their online trading presence, Online Trading Vouchers to the value of € 2,500 (up to a maximum of 50% of the total cost) are available through a programme under the Government’s National Digital Strategy and delivered through the Local Enterprise Offices - for more see this page.
 
Once you have decided to get up and running you have a number of options. Imadept can help you decide on which is the best option for you based on your needs, how many items your e-commerce site will need to accomodate, payment solutions and of course your budget.
 
There are a seletion of hosted E-commerce systems available including Shopify, IShoppingCart, BigCommerce, Yahoo and Wix. These provide an online shop on thier platform with customisable design for a monthly fee.
 
You can also choose to use a shopping cart hosted on Imadept servers.
 
Some of the available self-hosting shopping carts are as follows.
  • Drupal Commerce
  • Wordpress/WooCommerce
  • Magento
  • OpenCart
  • Prestashop
  • X-Cart
  • Zencart
  • OSCommerce
  • LiteCommerce

Whatever system you choose, either hosted or self-hosted, they will rarely do exactly what you need straight out of the box and may require custom coding. This may include the purchase of some plugins, or for you to do without a few requirements until your budget allows when business picks up.

Imadept.com will look at your project and help you choose the best platform suited to your needs and budget. 
 
After this we will discuss the design of the site in terms of how it will look - colours / pictures / content / items for sale etc. You will need to consider how many products you will offer in your online store, and, will the products have any varients - can people buy the product in different sizes and amounts for example.
 
Shipping will need to be considered. How will you deliver the product to your customer. There are options here as well and we will go through each with you.
 
We will then put the platform and design together and deliver an E-commerce site that meets your specific needs and budget.
 

An example of an E-commerce package could be a WordPress website with WooCommerce. This would be hosted by Imadept and offers you an admin log-in where you can update / delete products, change pricing etc;  a website designed and styled to match your requirements, including a Blog if you desire where you can talk about news & offers etc and communicate with your customers through a comments area; plus basic Search Engine Optimisation (we will set it up for you with some optimisation and build the platform so that you can add and monitor your web traffic).

The shopping cart will have a back office where you can administer your products, product categories, and promotions. Plus here you will be able to track and administer all sales and customers. 

Prices for an E-commerce package range from between €1,800 for a small E-commerce site with some SEO, to around €7,000 for a bigger site with more products, purchase and shipping options and SEO.

All of our eCommerce websites come with a training also so that you or your staff are comfortable with being able to update the site and products yourself.

We also offer our clients Maintenance packages. If you would like us to work with you on an on-going basis, we can organise - shopping cart updates monthly, create Digital Marketing campaigns, work on increasing traffic to your site through search engines (optimising your website pages for good SEO) and more... if that is what you require. It’s like having your own in-house Web Department for a low monthly fee. This enables you to get a platinum level e-Commerce store while spreading your payments. 

Make the most of your business - start selling online today. Call us for a no obligation chat where we will be happy to discuss your options.

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