Generate Online Sales Fast with an eCommerce Website
Is eCommerce an opportunity for your business?
Real Marketing can advise you on the ecommerce platform that’s best for your website and build it fast and cost effectively. Our team has worked with the ecommerce platforms below over many years.
McKinsey agrees that moving into ecommerce is much faster than many believe:
“We have found that companies can create a working e-commerce site in much less time than they think. In fact, a poor understanding of what’s really possible with digital can be one of the most significant hinderances to moving quickly.” (McKinsey)
Getting set up for ecommerce needn’t be expensive. Every project is carefully assessed and costed individually. Our fees for complete e-commerce solutions start from about £2,000.
We also guarantee to get you selling online within 3 weeks using Ecwid (subject to capacity – see below), assuming you provide the required access and content at the start of the project.
We may also be able to achieve a similarly fast solution with WooCommerce but these setups may take a little longer, so you’ll be advised of timescales.
While Shopify may be best known for ecommerce, the market leader for online sales is WooCommerce from WordPress. And, you may already have a WordPress website because nearly half the websites on the internet are run on WordPress. However, Ecwid is easy to set up across websites and social media and is good value, so well worth considering.
Your approach to ecommerce needs to fit within your digital marketing strategy.
WooCommerce works with WordPress and is the most popular platform with 26% market share (top million eCommerce websites, BuiltWith.com).
WooCommerce turns any website into a fully functioning ecommerce online shop. Also, there are extensions available for integrating payment gateways, social media, email marketing, 1-click selling, and shipping. Everything you need.
If you have one of the more than 75 million websites that are already run on WordPress and you want to add an online store to it, WooCommerce may be your best choice.
It’s easy to install and learn, and, as an open source platform, the basic version is free. It is highly customizable and there is a 1-click selling app.
WordPress is the best platform for search engine optimisation (SEO) which is a really important strength.
Your project would involve:
- A review of your existing website.
- Quick overview of onsite SEO and whether the Yoast SEO plugin is already being used.
- Update WordPress Core and plugins, where necessary.
- Install and configure WooCommerce.
- Add selected products for launch.
- Provide WooCommerce training so that you can add products yourself and manage your own onsite SEO.
There are optional facilities which you may want, such as setting up a separate website development environment, adding more payment platforms and installing Yoast SEO.
Ecwid is a cloud ecommerce platform used by over 1 million merchants in 175+ countries and offers one of the easiest way to add an online store to any website, social media platform or multiple websites simultaneously. You don’t need much training to use Ecwid.
It’s a ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) product, which means that you don’t own the software, but pay a monthly fee to use it. Ecwid is good for those who don’t want to pay high ecommerce web design fees, so a good option for small businesses and startups. Ecwid works well and looks great on laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and desktops.
Ecwid can be also be set up as an individual, standalone website as well as being designed to be added to an existing website.
Ecwid is easy to integrate with WordPress (as well as other platforms). Just install a plugin within the panel and you can immediately publish your products. It also allows you to easily create stores on Facebook and Instagram.
For onsite SEO, you can edit the title of your page and its meta description easily.
The control panel is easy and straightforward to use. If a shopper likes something, he or she can just drag the item into the shopping cart, a cool feature which is not provided by most other platforms.
Shopify is one of the best platforms for selling and has a market share of over 25%. If you plan to sell through social media platforms, Shopify could be a good choice.
The platform offers additional sales channels by providing you with the software and hardware to sell inside physical shops, across social media platforms, and integrated with powerful online marketplaces like Amazon.
Shopify is run by more than 160,000 retailers in 100 different countries, including: Tesla Motors, Gatorade, Forbes, Amnesty International, Encyclopedia Britannica, CrossFit…
Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and a Shopify POS for simple brick and mortar shops which can take payments via their mobile app. However, Shopify has some SEO weaknesses.
Squarespace is an all-in-one website platform. It offers drag-and-drop and now has a fully-fledged ecommerce platform. Squarespace offers sleek templates and design capabilities.
The design themes are mostly minimalistic with a heavy reliance on good, polished imagery, which is great for designer retailers and any visually aesthetic services that lend themselves to good photos.
The service has a simple and intuitive user interface and is fairly user-friendly for novices.
Squarespace is perfect for simple, low volume stores and provides reasonable out-of-the-box SEO.
Squarespace provides all the standard options like product variants, inventory management, unlimited products, coupons, shipping…. The platform also integrates with Shipstation.com and ShipBob for fulfilment and has great customer service.
You can optimize your website and conversions including sales, revenue, traffic sources and more. Marketing tools include SEO settings, social media, blogging and abandoned checkout recovery.
