How to set up an online shop

Not so long ago, online stores and e Commerce websites were too complex to build and too expensive to maintain to be used by most small businesses. Now however, with the widespread availability of standard eCommerce solutions such as Woocommerce, it is relatively simple to sell your products or services online, without it costing the earth. In this article I will outline how to set up an online shop.

Firstly, there are options to use third-party providers such as Shopify and Wix, who will create and host the shop for you. They will look after the running of the shop for a monthly fee. This arrangement will suit many small businesses, but there is a disadvantage to this in that you have less control over your website – less control over what it looks like, less control over how it runs and in some cases less control over what domain name you use for your site. For this reason a high percentage of small businesses choose to have a custom site made.

The setup costs for an e commerce websites are relatively low: you need a domain name , hosting  and an SSL cert  to keep all transactions secure. Using a payment gateway such as PayPal will allow you to accept payments (using Paypal or credit/debit cards) but they will charge a percentage (2-3%) per sale. The remainder of the setup costs go on paying for a developer to put it all together and make it look nice. So what you are mostly paying for is the developer’s time, which in the case of eCommerce sites can be considerable. Its not uncommon for eCommerce projects for SMEs to end up costing thousands of euros. And that’s before you sell anything!

At Go Design we can deliver eCommerce site setup and design for as little as €1500. We build the site for you, to your specification, and for the fee we also market the site using SEO. A CMS is installed in each site, allowing you to update or edit your site yourself if you wish. E commerce websites, though they appear complex, are surprisingly easy to update and maintain. But just in case you run in to trouble, we provide support for 3 months after your site is launched.