Actinic Ecommerce Website Design

Ecommerce Web Design Explained

Ecommerce is short for Electronic Commerce, the process of selling products or services over the internet. A large amount of companies now provide ecommerce and the numbers are growing rapidly. It is forecast that by the end of 2007, 9% of all retail sales will be completed online. There are six main areas to ecommerce; ecommerce software, product catalogue, payment processing, shipping, search engine optimisation and hosting.

Ecommerce Software - Actinic Catalog/Business Version 9

The software we use for ecommerce website design is called Actinic, they are the market leader in ecommerce solutions and at £399 + vat (£468.83), it is incredibly good value. Details of this software can be found here. A example of a successful thriving ecommerce website we created using this ecommerce software is Smithfield Wine.

Ecommerce Product Catalogue

There are 2 parts to this area - the catalogue your customers get to browse and the catalogue that you maintain. After you add, remove or amend a product in your catalogue, you click a button to update your website. The product name, price, weight (for shipping costs) and an image are typical information you include for a product. Other features such as choice of size or colour can also be included at this stage.

Ecommerce Payment Processing

Once a customer places an order, you need to take their payment. There are variations and different options available, although the options fall into two main categories:

Offline Processing

Customer inputs their payment details, you download the order using Actinic and process the payment offline (not on the internet). Typically, if you already have a retail outlet and a card machine, you can download the order through Actinic and process the payment manually.

When processing customer payments using this method, it is highly recommended to offer secure hosting. Secure hosting protects the payment process and ensures that card details are taken in a secure method. You may recognise from previous experiences, the little gold padlock that appears in your browser. "http", which is at the start of any web address is also changed to "https", with the 's' standing for 'secure'. These are both signs that users look for and without them, you are guaranteed to have some customers leave at the payment stage. A Secure Socket Layer (SSL certificate) costs £150 per year and can be added to your hosting charges.

Online Processing

Customer inputs their payment details and their payment is processed online using a Payment Service Provider (PSP). A PSP processes the payment and credits the money into your business account through your merchant account. PROTX is the most popular (£20 per month if you have 1,000 transactions or less per quarter), however this is a business decision and something you will need to investigate to find the most suitable for your business. Secure hosting is not needed for 'online processing' as your PSP does this as part of their service.

Shipping

As your customers can live anywhere in the world, you will need to ship items to their chosen address. Dependant on weight, size and destination, shipping costs can vary somewhat and Actinic handles all of this for you. Shipping can be done by order value i.e. under £50 = £3.95 and over £50 = £0.00 OR you can ship by weight. Each product in your catalogue has it's weight included, when a customer goes to pay for their chosen products, Actinic totals up the weights and looks this total up in a shipping database, where it will calculate the costs to a specified destination. This shipping cost is automatically added to an order and paid for at the checkout stage. The amounts you wish to charge for shipping are controlled by you.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

So you have a great ecommerce website full of exciting and excellent products, you provide secure payment processing and your website is reliable and easy to navigate. You just sit back and wait for the money to roll in right? Not quite...but almost. Once you have all of the above factors complete, you need people to come visit your ecommerce website and be able to find your products. This is where search engines and search engine optimisation comes in. By creating 'content rich' websites which are optimised for search engines, you have the best chance of being listed highly. The higher you are listed, the more visitors and the more sales you can expect to achieve. Actinic has built in SEO and this works exceedingly well. Smithfield Wine previously mentioned has many of its key products listed in the first 5 results on Google, with the large majority of these in either 1st, 2nd or 3rd spot. This is key to a successful website and is not something that happens overnight (despite many companies and their outrageous claims). Being one of the top search engine results is similar to being the market leader in your industry, it takes time and does not happen overnight.

Actinic Ecommerce Website Hosting

Hosting costs for an Actinic ecommerce website are more expensive than a normal website. Ecommerce websites are dynamic. 'Dynamic' means that content on some pages is interactive and can be controlled by the user. A prime example is the'shopping cart' page, where a visitor chooses a product and adds it to the shopping cart.

Our starter hosting package has ample bandwidth for a busy ecommerce website and costs £210 per year. As the traffic (visitors) to your site increases, you may need to move up to the next package. The next package, which has 2.5 times the bandwidth of our starter package costs £350. Please remember this is all relative, the more visitors you are having to your site, the more sales you should be making.

What Will an Actinic Website Design Cost?

There are mandatory costs that any Actinic ecommerce website will incur before any development starts. These are as follows:

The above £680.00 gives us the tools we need to build the ecommerce website. We then need to design your website, add your products and complete various bits of information such as terms & conditions, business address, shipping charges etc. Once we have completed the build and you are 100% satisfied, we can visit you to set up the ecommerce software and train you on how to use it.

It is very difficult to provide a reliable quotation for an Actinic website design, without some further information. The amount of products to be listed and the work involved can vary substantially. For instance you may have 100 products with details, pricing and images already created. This would be a quick build. You may have 500 products with no details, this would take substantially longer. Birmingham Model Centre has nearly 5,000 products listed and took three months to build.

An Actinic ecommerce website design is going to cost a minimum of £1,880 (this includes the £680 above). Precise quotations can be provided once we have assessed your build.

Ecommerce Website Summary

If you have made it this far, i'm guessing you are very interested in having an ecommerce website. If you are a small company with a view to expanding in the future or if you are a large company with a multitude of products to offer, Actinic and Website Designed are your perfect combination. Give us a call and let us talk you through our ecommerce solutions.