You will need a website address (www) so your customer know where to go to buy your products or services. If possible it should be short and simple to remember. Think of domain names like phone numbers – they are actually more relevant to people than they are to Google. We can register your domain name for you and it takes less than 24 hours and is usually secured for a minimum of 1 year.

A secure socket Layer (SSL) cert is a must for your Ecommerce website. It ensures your website is https and puts that all important little lock icon on the address bar for when customers visit. This will make sure that all traffic from your website is secure and will reassure your customers that their data is properly protected. It will also help with your search rankings and Google will rank secure sites higher than those who are not.

Now this is where you will need help. There are a few Ecommerce Platforms out there from BigCommerce, SquareSpace, Wix to Woocommerce and Shopify. A web designer (like Jascom Ltd) can advise you which platform is suitable for you. Some platforms like Woocommerce (most popular) are a complete online shop which is installed into a new or existing website. While Shopify is an online shop in itself and while its very good at selling its not so useful if you want to do other things with your website like Blogs or Virtual Tours. All of these platforms have templates which defined the way the shop experience looks and feels for the customer. Your web designer can help configure all of this for you but if you are starting out you will need help from a techie.

Website Hosting is a service that connects to your domain so customers can access your shop. Its is comprise of web space services (similar to disk space on your computer) which is hosted on a web server on the internet and email  services (usually about 5 mailbox like info@, sales@, etc). The two services together are known as Web Hosting and can be provided by Jascom Ltd on an annual basis. These services are expandable so as your business grows you can add more space, more mailboxes etc as you move up level on your paid plan.

In order to be able to take online payments for your goods and services you will need to register with a Payment Processor. This is a company like Paypal, Realex or Stripe who verify and take the payment from a customers credit cards for you. They take a small commission (eg 3.5%) and they make those funds available for you to draw down to your bank account. By using these payment processors it means that you never have to manage the credit card data directly your self (GDPR) and these companies can handle millions of transactions per second from cards all over the World. It pays to do some research on what fees and how often they payout to your account as there are all slightly different.

So once you have all of the previous steps completed the last thing you need to do is to upload your product catalogue. You should put time into organising this data offline before you try to upload online. Organise your products into categories as that is usually how your customers expect to find it organised on your website eg Shoes, HandBags, etc. Your products will need to have meta data which describes the product as per below :

• Product Name
• Product Description
• Product Category
• Product Image
• Product Price
• Product Tags eg Shoes, Womens, DKNY, Ireland
• Product Attribute eg Size, Colour, Brand

We recommend organising your product catalog into an Excel Sheet in this way so that you are prepared for the manual product upload. Sometimes these excel sheets can even be imported into your shop but you will usually need help from your Web Designer do this. Either way the product upload takes time and you need to allow for that. You also need to think about how many products you should upload initially as you may not need to upload everything you sell to the website – just to get you going.

Probably one of the most important elements to success for your online shop is to have a person to manage it. The shop will need to be managed the same way as a bricks and mortar shop needs some to manage it too. So be aware that although having an Ecommerce wont overwhelm you especially in the beginning as time grows and hopefully your sales – you will need to make time for your Shop Manager to be able to run the shop. Here are some of the tasks they will need to do

• Upload New Products
• Manage Orders
• Reply to Email Queries
• Ship the products via Post/Courier
• Process Refunds
• Run Sales Promotions

At Jascom Ltd we always provide training on how to run the online shop and provide a simple straightforward guide. We are there for you when you need help but ultimately your shop manage will run the shop on a day to day basis.