Online trading opens up a national and even worldwide stage, whether you already have a bricks and mortar retail shop or you’re just interested in running a small business selling bits and pieces from home. There are, though, a few things to consider when planning your venture.

First and foremost is just that – planning! Think about what you want to achieve, what your skills are and what your future plans may be. For example, are you hoping to need the option to expand in the future?

Are you comfortable building a website and installing and configuring eCommerce software such as OSCommerce yourself? If so, a web hosting package is likely to be the best choice for you – choose the highest spec package you can reasonably afford to give yourself plenty of room to grow in the future, but make sure that it includes a database as it’s likely that any shop software you use will require one.

If you’d prefer not to construct your shop yourself you have a couple of choices. You could hire a website designer – in which case, make sure you clearly scope out exactly what you want from your site, including the administrative back-end as well as the website your customers will see – you’ll need somewhere you can upload new products, manage inventory, manage customer databases, create invoices and so on. Or you could opt for an integrated shop design, admin and web hosting package like our eShop products if you’d prefer to keep costs low or stay on top of your site yourself but without having to delve into code.

Whichever method you choose, it’s crucial to keep your potential customers at the forefront of your mind. Choose a clean, clear design and make sure it’s really easy for people to navigate your site, find what you want, and pay for their items – the more complicated the process, the more potential customers you’ll lose along the way. You’ll need to develop a look and feel for your brand that you can use throughout your site for a consistent feel – think about what sort of style might fit your products, and keep it as clean and uncluttered as possible to really show your products off.

Think about how you’ll showcase your products – what sort of categories might people expect to find them under? Have you got good photos of them, including additional shots of any particularly unusual or interesting details? How will you describe them? With your images and copy you’re aiming to highlight their key features and benefits to customers as concisely and enticingly as possible – keep it short and sweet, use bullet points for feature lists, tell customers why they want it, and keep the format consistent from product to product so it’s easy for customers to compare items. Make sure you include crucial information like weight, measurements, number included, colour etc where appropriate.

While developing your web shop, you’ll also need to think about how to take payments. There’s a number of options, but one of the simplest and most recognisable is PayPal, which allows you to accept credit and debit cards, bank transfers and PayPal balance. Online consumers are used to paying by PayPal and they’ll handle all of the card processing for you, so it’s a great option – you can start taking payments online whilst still a fledgling business yet benefit from the customer confidence invoked by an established, trusted name. Our eShop packages can be integrated with PayPal easily.

For more detailed information about things to consider when setting up your own online shop, download this pdf Guide to eCommerce, written by PayPal in conjunction with Daily Internet.

Need more information?
We’ll be talking about starting to sell online in more detail in future articles, but we know that lots of our customers have questions about payment processing. So, if you have any questions about online payment processing, we’d be happy to put them to the PayPal team – just drop us a line and we’ll see if we can answer your questions in a future blog article.