E-commerce for the smaller business.

If you are a small business looking to sell online, chances are you’ve spent ages researching the right way forward and are now more confused than ever!

For web shops it may be surprising to know that a huge majority of online shops operated by businesses use the same trusted systems.

These systems provide the ‘back office’ to provide the cataloging, payment processing and account elements.

Your web designer then builds the design and layout, sets up products, postage, security and hosting for you, as well as all the nice looking stuff like information pages to back up the sales pages. Then they teach you how to use the admin.

The big one is WooCommerce and is our first choice now for online shops where it fits a customers requirements. It’s market share is nearly 30% which represents the largest used system for ecommerce by a long way.

WooCommerce is popular in part due to it working as a module within ‘WordPress’ which is a favorite CMS with studios and is used for both small and large companies all across the globe.

CubeCart is another shop system I use. It provides a super shopping system. It’s admin is super simple for clients to use.

These systems give businesses the option to sell online without having to go ‘custom build’, which would work out vastly more expensive.

‘Custom’ may sometimes be the only answer, your project may not fit the popular shopping platforms, or your internal systems or policies may dictate a custom build. You’d be likely to know if the quote on your desk was for a bespoke system as costs would be VASTLY higher (consider the amount of development time required to come up with a piece of software/system from scratch).

What the likes of WooCommerce give clients, is a platform that offers ready security updates, functionality, access to payment systems off the shelf and a system a designer can use to create a great looking shop.