Marketplace focused: Seller primarily focuses on using platforms such as Ebay and Amazon. Products are typically ‘dropshipped’, meaning that they are not physically stored by the seller and are shipped directly from suppliers to the customers. In this case the sellers is acting as a ‘middleman’ and success depends on diligent sourcing of competitively priced products. This is an ideal way for new businesses to get started with little investment being required and with minimal risk – however, competition is fierce and performance is heavily reliant on third parties.
3rd Party Managed Online Shop: Many successful businesses have used established eCommerce service suppliers such as Shopify as a base from which to build highly effective online stores. This approach allows anyone to access most of the features that are needed to generate explosive online sales performance, including good site speed and search engine optimisation by default. The development costs for this approach are relatively low and results can be achieved very quickly when compared to creating and entire shop from scratch via fully custom software development. This approach supports both dropshipping and other forms supply chain options too – making this a very attractive solution for a wide variety of situations.
Multi Channel: Larger projects may include a hybrid combination of managed online retail services, marketplace listings and some custom website development too. In general, the more custom development that is undertaken, the more flexible the business operations can become and the more self reliant too. These benefits allow for a wider range of marketing possibilities, data collection, tracking, monitoring and optimisation and can therefore yield a potentially higher return on investment (ROI) than less self reliant approaches. Success here will require significant understanding of technology and sales/business techniques, plus far greater financial outlay than the previous two options.
Cutting Edge: This is usually the realm of some of the largest corporations in the world and involves large in-house research, design and development teams who work full time to develop fully custom eCommerce solutions. While these projects may make use of other service suppliers and even free open source software solutions, they will tend to create proprietary software for their own use and invest large amounts of resources into the process. The large budgets of these projects means that every conceivable effective avenue of optimisation and promotion will likely be tested and used.
Customised Shopify store configurations: Including bespoke Shopify theme designs.
Full webshop software development: Fully custom retail websites, including open source retail solutions such as WooCommerce for Wordpress.
Payment gateway configurations: Including Worldpay, Paypal, Stripe, Klana & various cryptocurrency service providers such as Bitpay and tokens such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, Hive & many others.
Product Inventory Management: For marketplaces and webshop installations.
Product Fullfilment Solutions: Integration of services from third party product fulfilment centres to hold physical stock and handle deliveries to end customers. Examples of ethical fulfilment services are Fulfilment Crowd in Great Britain and Verde in the USA.
Marketplace Integrations: To connect your site to platforms such as Ebay/Amazon, plus automate inventory management between them.
Social Media Platforms: Configuration and integration of eCommerce features on popular social sites, including Facebook, Youtube & Instagram.
Search Engine Optimisation: Increased rankings and exposure of eCommerce sites and pages within search engines through various options, including on-page optimisations, inventory optimisations and other SEO techniques.
Physical 'Point of Sale' (POS) systems: Various options to allow payments to be integrated in bricks and mortar premises.
Training: We ensure that employees know how to make the best use of eCommerce software.