eCommerce

This all depends on what system your site is built on and how old the site is.

The world’s most popular content management system (CMS) is WordPress, which happens to be our platform of choice. If you’ve got a WordPress website then you can certainly add eCommerce to it, but you’ll want to get our experts to help.

If you built your own site in SquareSpace or Weebly, they have eCommerce options which are pretty easy to set up. We have experience in setting up SquareSpace eCommerce and would be happy to help you out.

If you’re not sure what you can do with your site, give us a call; we’ll take a look under the hood and give you some advice, free of charge.

Great question, and one that should be asked right at the beginning! A couple of things to think about:

1. Does my target market shop online? Increasingly the answer will be ‘yes’ but you need to make sure you have a market to sell to.
2. Can I ship my products easily and affordably? The bigger, heavier and more delicate your products the more it will cost you to ship them to customers. Ideally you’ll want to offer free shipping so make sure your profit margins can cover this.
3. Who am I competing against? If you’re selling FMCG’s (fast moving consumer goods) like books, toys or groceries then you’ll have direct competition from some big players. Can you match them on price? If not, can you offer a better experience that gives people a reason to shop with you? Remember, competition isn’t a bad thing – it shows you that there’s a market out there you can sell to!

If you’re unsure, we’d be happy to discuss your ideas and advise you on whether eCommerce is a good fit for you.

For small businesses or side-hustles, you might not even need your own eCommerce store.

For home-based arts and crafts businesses, there are platforms like Etsy that help you sell in a virtual marketplace. If you’re a writer you can self-publish and sell through print-on-demand services like Lulu. And anyone can set up a store on Amazon to sell pretty much anything worldwide.

The advantages of partnering with these platforms include easy setup and access to a big market of existing customers. They are a great way of dipping your toes into eCommerce and working out if you have a market for your products or not.

However you’ll be paying them for the privilege. The choice may come down to how much profit you are willing to share with the platform, and how much control over the customer experience you want to have.

Let’s be straight-up: Building an eCommerce website is going to cost you time and money, but how much of each is really up to you.

There are great DIY platforms out there like Shopify that are designed for non-web professionals to get an online store up and running quickly and easily. In practice, we’ve found it’s not quite that easy so you’ll probably want a bit of expert help along the way, and be prepared to pour a lot of time into the process.

If you’re time-poor and would rather just get it done fast with minimum hassle, you’ll get the best result if you engage a web partner like Liquid Edge from the start. We can give you the right advice and ensure you don’t get stuck down any dead-ends.

Most eCommerce sites we build are in the $6000-$12,000 budget range but we can work out a budget that suits you, starting at around $3000.

Also keep in mind the operating costs, such as website hosting, transaction fees, site maintenance, ongoing development and marketing. We can come up with a monthly SLA to cover all of this and keep things simple.

Absolutely! We’ve built eCommerce websites to sell a lot of different things, including:

• eBooks
• Event tickets
• Service subscriptions
• Customizable products
• Downloadable digital products

For sure! Woocommerce handles these very efficiently. Bulk discounts, BOGO (buy one get one free), free shipping over a certain purchase amount and more – you name it, we can make it happen.

Good news – you don’t have to worry about processing payments at all! There are specialist payment providers (or “gateways”) that take care of this for you and make it easy and secure for people to pay. The best part: you never have to hold people’s credit card details on your website; this is all done by the payment gateway so they take responsibility for keeping your customer’s details safe and secure.

There are a variety of payment gateways available including Stripe, PayPal and POLI plus simple finance providers like AfterPay and Humm. We can provide advice on the best payment gateways for your business and give you the low-down on processing fees.

We’re experts at getting you found online. We start with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), making sure your site meets Google’s requirements and your content is relevant to what people are searching for. On top of that, we also recommend:

• Using Social Media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Linkedin to drive people to your online store.
• Setting up a Google Shopping product feed.
• Using Facebook & Instagram shopping and product tagging to make it easy for people to buy your products online.
• Using paid ads on Google & Facebook to drive people to your website.
• Building a customer database for email marketing campaigns that promote your products and services. 

We can help you figure out which channels are best to focus on to market your particular online store and empower you to do it yourself or take care of the whole plan for you. Get in touch to have a chat about marketing your online store.

Most courier and postage companies have clever ways of integrating with your website to make shipping, labels and packing slips easy.

We can integrate your eCommerce website with NZ Post, NZ Couriers, Post Haste, DHL, Aramex and most other national and international carriers.