The Daily eShop Forum is intended to create a space where people who have eShops can share their tips and tricks, ask questions and make suggestions.

Everyone at Daily is a forum member too, of course, and we’ll be checking in regularly, so if you need our advice or have a question or suggestion for us just log in (you’ll need to register as  a forum member first, though you can read previous discussions without logging in) and either post a new topic or join an existing conversation if it seems relevant.

Of course, a community really needs participation to make it work, so if you already have an eShop or you’re interested in setting up an online shop but would like a little more advice before you dive in, head on over to http://forum.daily.co.uk and join in! It might take a little while to get going, but we’re sure that our eShop customers will find it really useful to have a place to share their thoughts with each other and make suggestions to us. As a starter for ten, why not use the forum to make some suggestions for things you think we could do to help us support your online shop business?

Following on from our introduction to building an online shop, we’re giving you 20% off when you buy an eShop account before 16th June.

New customers and existing customers who want to upgrade their current eShop account can use the code ESHOP20 to claim their discount.

Get your discounted eShop now

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.

According to the study reported in the Mail, while most smaller companies had a web presence almost two thirds used it purely as a shop window rather than as an extra sales platform. That’s a startling statistic, and indicative of a huge missed opportunity. While it’s fantastic that businesses recognise the importance of having a web presence, it seems a shame that so many are missing out on their slice of that £20 billion online sales market when building an online shop can be very straightforward.

So, how easy is it to grab your slice of that pie?

Well, there are a few different routes to online trading, so no matter how confident you are or how much time you can put in to developing an eCommerce website there will be something that suits you.

If you’re a confident developer, or you’re happy to pay someone to get under the hood of your website, all you need is a web hosting account (preferably one with a database), some shopping cart software (there’s an easy-installer script for OSCommerce with accounts like the Business Hosting package), and the time to build and upload your site.

If you’d rather spend your time servicing all your new customers than tinkering with code, eShop is the ideal choice. Hosting is integrated with a flexible shop-creation system that makes it easy to set up a great-looking eCommerce site – and also includes secure payment systems and backoffice order management for efficient processing and keeping track of orders. Just spend a little time thinking about some of the practicalities (what categories do you want to divide your products into? would you prefer to take payments via PayPal or direct? do you need to display prices with or without VAT?), and then use eShop’s built-in shop creation wizard to get started.

If that still seems a bit more than you need, Instant Website Pro features a built-in shop wizard to get you trading online quickly and easily and makes a nice introduction to selling your products online.

So whatever your business, with all the solutions on offer there’s really nothing stopping anyone from building a web shop and discovering a whole new customer base online. What are you waiting for?

Several times in conversation, we have heard of our eShop customers involving a web design company to get their shop off the ground by uploading their images and products and generally designing their sites.

What shocks us is when we hear how much our customers have been charged for this service – in some cases it’s been up to £1000 and then further fees of several hundred pounds to make any additional updates. Compare this with our Managed Setup service. We’ll charge just £35 per hour for getting your eShop off the ground, and as a guide we’ve found that many typical layouts and designs don’t take more than two or three hours maximum.

We all know that separate web design companies aren’t always cheap, however their fees are typically for building a totally bespoke website from scratch – customised to your specific needs. For an online shopping site needing shopping baskets, payment calculators, secure checkout facilities etc. it’s easy to understand why their fees can be high as there’s a lot of work involved. The beauty of eShop, though, is that you’re already half way there already due to the templated design and the backend features already included in the package.

My advice to anyone thinking of involving a third party web design company in designing their eShop is to give us a call or drop us an email first. A few minutes of your time could save you hundreds of pounds. It may be that we can show you how to achieve what you want yourself within the eShop system, but if not we’re confident that our custom design prices are highly competitive.

Contact Us

Online shopping is big business, and the collaboration between Daily Internet and Protx offers customers an excellent, low risk way to build a business as an online trader taking secure transactions.

More about payment processing with Protx.

Sign up for two months’ free payment processing.

The payment processing offer applies to any new eShop from Daily.co.uk and is valid until 31st January 2009.

Struggling to find time to build your online shop?

Don’t forget, we also have a Managed Set-up service for eShop. We’ll be happy to step in to help build your web shop if you’re finding you just don’t have the time you’d like to devote to building your online shopping website. Just contact the Helpdesk team and we’ll discuss your needs with you and provide a bespoke quote for the work.

To solve that problem, we’ve got two web design services that take the pain out of getting up and running – there’s a Helping Hand for Instant Website and Managed Setup for eShop.

If you’re an online trader, whether you’re just starting out or already pay your bills on the strength of online shopping, we can take the pressure off getting your online shop sorted with our Managed Setup service for eShop. eShop is a hugely flexible product that gives you the power to build, host and take payments via a professional looking shop, and our Managed Setup service is just as flexible. Because each trader’s needs are different, the service is completely bespoke. We’ll start by discussing your requirements so that we can work with you to get your web shop just the way you want it. To have a chat with us about how we can help, just give us a call or drop us a line.

For a standard site, our Helping Hand service for Instant Website takes the hassle out of designing your website. For just £50 for up to 5 pages of content or £70 for up to 30 pages, we’ll do the legwork for you. All you need to do is have a chat with us about how you’d like your site to look, send us any text and photos you want to include, and we’ll organise the site and content on your behalf. Once you’ve bought your Instant Website, just purchase the service from within your My Daily control panel to get the ball rolling.

We think these tools are great for learning exactly how visitors use your website and therefore giving you the knowledge to amend your site so that it really suits your visitors. With Heat Maps and Click Maps, you can see an overlay of your website showing where the hotspots are for clicks and which areas seem to be being ignored – do you have a promotion that isn’t clicked on much because people with lower screen resolutions can’t see it so easily? Or are people mistaking a simple image for something which is clickable? Click Movies takes this idea one step further – you’ll be able to see video playback of customers’ navigation around your site, so you can see the order in which things catch your customers’ eyes. To talk directly to your customers, we’ve added an unobtrusive customer satisfaction survey. We’ll even automatically enable Google Analytics for you, so you can get the benefit of Google’s powerful web analytics without having to manually insert their code into each page of your website.

Plus there are direct revenue benefits, too. With click fraud detection you can be alerted to suspicious clicks on your pay-per-click ads, and even producing reports that you can use to put your case to the search engines for reimbursement. With Lead Generation, you can get relevant information on all business visitors to your site without requiring them to fill in a form, extracting sales leads from your website.

The Google Analytics automation service, a free ‘sales lead of the day’, and the online survey tool are all free with selected Daily.co.uk web hosting and eShop packages. If you already have a qualifying package you should find you’ve been automatically upgraded so that you have access to these new services – just log into your My Daily control panel and visit the new ‘Internet Marketing’ section. You can also opt for free trials of heat map, movie recording and click fraud detection services.

We’re already talking about some of the other great services our customers could take advantage of, so if you have any suggestions for new services and website widgets you’d like to see us offer, just drop us a line.

Further Information:

Internet Marketing Tools from Daily.co.uk

Web Hosting from Daily.co.uk

Online Shopping with eShops from Daily.co.uk

What made you start the business?
I am a web designer and my mother is a retailer and between us we were itching to start a retail business online, because hopefully with my web skills and her retail experience we could really do well.

We spent 4 years searching for the right product! From the web perspective, we needed a product for which we could already identify keywords – a brand name or product that was already being searched. From the retail point of view, we wanted a small product that was easy to store and to ship.

When the popularity for charm bead bracelets started there were a couple of brand names already being searched online, so we bought into another brand name and used keywords for all three to enhance our own product searches.

How did your business evolve?
We initially started in November 2007 with an eBay shop, where there were around 350 similar items listed at any one time. By February 2008, this had increased to over 3000!

We saw the popularity was increasing and knew that it was imperative to get our products into our own store.

We built our shop with the Daily.co.uk eShop Business package. Business has been wonderful, and has far surpassed our expectations since we launched the site in March 2008.

We’ve also just tried out the integrated newsletter tool, sending out to 500 people and generating 3 big orders within a few hours. We are far happier selling through our Daily.co.uk shop than eBay, as in our Daily shop customers “fill” their baskets, sometimes with up to 10 items, whereas eBay buyers seem to just buy one or two items at a time.

What attracted you to Daily.co.uk?
I came to Daily after testing a similar product with another company. I was very disappointed with their service – they didn’t answer support emails for days on end. I did a Google search, read about Daily.co.uk and made a quick technical call.  I got an answer within a few rings and my question clarified within minutes, so I set up shop with Daily.co.uk. Everyone has been very helpful and quick to answer our questions. I am so impressed with the Daily service that I am also contemplating taking out a Reseller account for my web design business, where I am currently hosting 40 domains for clients!

What was the biggest challenge you faced in getting Be Charmed to where it is now?
Our biggest challenge to date has been marketing. In my role as a web designer, I am constantly learning about new search engine optimisation techniques and ways to expose the website to more visitors (hence taking up the opportunity to feature on the Daily Blog!). I never miss an opportunity to promote.

Our other challenge has been understanding how to “read our customers’ minds”. It seems that some members of the British public are sceptical about online shopping, thinking that they are about to get stitched up! For us, reassurance is paramount and we always answer the simplest of questions in the most friendly and expedient manner. We try to reassure them on the site with as much detail as possible.

What’s next for Be Charmed Jewellery?
Our next step is to grow the business by gradually adding more ranges. We will take this slowly and surely, testing the market at every step of the way. We will be especially interested to see how the Christmas period pans out. In our first year we did well, but we expect to do much more during Christmas 2008.

Further information:

• Go jewellery shopping at Be Charmed.
• Find out more about Online Shopping with Daily.co.uk eShop.