Do I need an E-commerce website to sell my products online?

We get a lot of enquiries from people requiring information about setting up online shops. In fact more than half of all our enquiries relate to e-commerce questions. Over the last 7 years we have designed a wide range of e-commerce based websites for clients around New Zealand. These shopping carts can be viewed in our portfolio section.

One of the beauties of the internet is that it enables basically anyone, to have their own e-commerce website on the internet, to sell their products, even without having a physical store. Having your shop on the internet, opens up your business from catering to a solely local market, to instead catering to a national or a global market. Having an e-commerce website, is also often a cost effective way to sell products, with minimal overheads compared to a physical store. There a lot lot of success stories out there, of companies who have done very well from setting up an e-commerce website.

What are my options for an E-commerce Website?

There are two main types of E-Commerce / Shopping cart website. One is a CMS (Content Management System) based shopping cart which is fully automated, and the other is a static based shopping cart.

Automated CMS based shopping cart systems are very convienent, and allow clients to add/edit and delete products whenever you want, using their web browser. They also can have many other features too. They are however very complex pieces of software, and therefore automated shopping carts are more expensive to construct than static based shopping carts. They can also be more difficult to run and maintain, so some technical knowledge of using these types of systems is often required by the client. There is also a licensing fee to buy and use the shopping cart software, which is paid to the softwares developer. There also will be ongoing maintenance fees, in keeping the shopping cart software up to date and secure from hackers, and fixing any software/server issues that can occur with these types of complex automated systems. Ongoing monthly hosting pricing for automated shopping cart systems is also more expensive as they require a higher level of server resources.

A static system on the other hand can be cheaper and less hassle, and is often best if you are not regually updating the cart yourself. You would choose this option if you didn't want to be able to update the website yourself, or are happy to get a web designer to do all the updating for you. If you want to be able to update the website yourself anytime, we would recommend a CMS Shopping Cart System. If you only need to update your website once or twice a year, we would recommend using a static cart system, where the designer would update the shopping cart for you, when you need it doing. A static cart system can also provided the greatest scope for designing the shopping cart to look exactly how the client wants the website to look, as CMS shopping cart systems tend to use set templates.

How can I accept payment through my E-commerce Website?

One of the first things you should decide on, is how you want to deal with the payment transactions that will occur on your E-commerce website. For credit card transactions you would need to decide whether you want the credit card payments to be processed in real-time over the internet when the transaction takes place, or will you download the credit card details from the secure server, to process manually. The later is the cheaper option and would suit website's that aren't processing a huge quantity of transactions, and/or require the shop owner getting back to their customers to confirm product availability, before billing their clients. Manual processing does however require the client to have their own credit card processing system, such as an eftpos terminal in-house, to process these transactions.

At the same time, you need to decide whether you want to price your goods in New Zealand dollars, or in US dollars. Real time credit card transactions are processed by a payment gateway, which interacts with the shopping cart of your website. There are a wide range of payment gateways available. Most don't cater for payments made in NZ dollars, but a growing number now do. Ones that do include Payment Express, ANZ eGate, Paymate, and Paymex.

There are also many other international payment gateways out there that cater to NZD transactions. these include 2checkout.com and Paypal, and Worldpay. Some of these payment gateways are not compatible with some shopping cart systems, so we would need to select the cart system based on the gateway they you intend to use.

The client must also enter into the contract with the payment gateway directly.

Please email us with details of your requirements.