Set up an Online Shop

If you need to set up an online shop for your business, please consider Colchester Website Services:

 

  • Shoppable Posts for Facebook and Instagram.
  • Sell from a single product to 100,000 products.
  • Multiple Payment Options – PayPal or SagePay for example.
  • No Hidden Costs.
  • SEO Search Engine Optimised from the start.
  • Prices from just £400.
  • First year’s hosting and domain name around £65 (additional cost).
  • Fast local service based in Colchester, Essex.
  • Chartered Institute of Marketing trained.

Who will own my Online Shop once it is set up?

The shop, domain name and hosting will be entirely owned by yourself or your company. You’ve seen all the online store options, such as Squarespace, Wix and Shopify. If you were to use these, the designs and information posted would be owned by these companies. If the costs and commissions become too high for you (Shopify especially has high fees and commissions) then you will lose your work, data and product information.

How do we set up your online shop?

  • Let us know the nature of your business and we can send through some shop design options. To keep the costs down for you, we will generally use a template based system. This can then be adapted to meet your requirements. Certain designs may add £50 to your costs, but it is unlikely to exceed this.
  • Following an online initial meeting, if you’re happy to proceed, we would ask for a £150 deposit.
  • If you already have a Website, you will have some choices to make. You can either run your online shop under a subdomain, ie. shop.yourcompanyname.com, under a main domain name such as shopyourcompanyname.com or alternately, you can move your website over to combine it with your shop. This may incur an additional cost depending on your current website.
  • Two hours training – the main effort involved in setting up to sell online is actually adding the products to your website. We will include two hours shared screen training to teach you how to upload your products. 
  • Add your products for sale – within 24 hours of your deposit being paid, your shop will be ready for you to add your products. This will speed up the process for you. You can get your products online while we finish working on the design.
  • You decide on your payment options ensuring you have, for example, a PayPal business account, or for regular credit card payments with a lower commission, consider SagePay combined with your existing merchant account, as this is often much cheaper.
  • While we offer our own hosting and domain name registrations, to ensure you will be fully in control in years to come and to take advantage of some hosting companies’ introductory pricing, we would suggest and we would help you set up an account with Ionos, as this will reduce your hosting, domain name and SSL Certificate (secure padlock in your browser) at a cost of approximately £50 for the first year. 

Stock Control & Shipping Methods

The Woocommerce system fully supports managed Stock Control and multiple shipping methods including click and collect.

Search Engine Optimisation and Google Registration

CWS have trained in SEO and Digital Marketing with the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

We are recommending this solution based on our expertise and training in SEO and PPC management. We will also ensure your website is registered in the Google Search Console and help you register it with Google My Business.

For further information or to discuss your requirements, please contact Martyn Gosling on 07767 624985 or email: martyn@colchesterwebsiteservices.com