Profitable e-commerce websites for small and medium-sized business

If you’re looking for a top online shop developer in Swindon, talk to us today.

Responsive web design and development for e-commerce

Looking to starting a business? Have an established one or want to put a toe in the water to try selling online? If so, we’re definitely the people to talk to.

We’ve been building e-commerce sites using WordPress and WooCommerce for years, and are confident we can build a shop which will meet your needs. This could be something relatively simple, or something more complicated with lots of products and categories.

During the pandemic, we saw lots of people turning to the Internet to sell their wares. Physical bricks-and-mortar shops shut down and trade fairs weren’t running. Virtual selling in an online shop was the logical choice.

How we build your online shop

Understanding your needs

Our approach to designing and building an e-commerce website starts with a discussion over coffee. We want to get to know you, your business, your ethos and your goals. E-commerce projects can often take a little longer to put together as you have to add your products and we have to build more page templates. It’s important we understand exactly what we’re building from the start.

We’ll usually create a wireframe – a black and white representation of your site – so that you can see how the different pages will join together. The wireframe allows us to experiment with different layouts too. Offering the right user experience – ensuring people can find what they want – is essential.

As most of our sites are WordPress-based, we use WooCommerce for our shops. WooCommerce is the most popular and arguably the best e-commerce plugin for WordPress. You can sell anything with WooCommerce, from physical products to digital downloads. There’s no limit to the number of products you can have in your store. WooCommerce also provides an excellent online interface for you to add, edit and remove products.

When you work with us, we don’t just build you a template and let you get on with it. We talk, plan, advise, assist and manage – everything you could possibly want, all under one roof.

How to structure your online shop

From the start, getting the right structure for your online shop is important. We’ll help you think through the categories and sub-categories you’ll need. Too many categories at the top level can be overwhelming for customers and it can be hard to choose where to go next. Too few categories is also difficult as visitors need to guess which section they may need to look at.

We’ll sit down with you and go through this in detail. Our wireframes can help here too as you can show them to existing or potential customers to see what they think.

Adding products to your store

We provide you with a template spreadsheet which you’ll populate with your products. We then upload this into your store on one of our development sites so that you can see how your products will look.

You can sell simple products (a table, for example) or product variants (a red jumper, a blue jumper or a green jumper all in different sizes). All can have different pictures and prices.

Managing stock levels

Your shop can help you manage your stock levels by automatically counting the number of items left in your storeroom. When this gets close to zero, you can alert your customers. When it hits zero, you won’t be able to sell any more of that product on the website.

Discounts and incentives – how can I sell more?

You can set up discount codes to provide extra reasons for your customers to buy. These could give people a percentage discount or money off specific products. You could have special “spend over X and receive Y” offers – the choice is yours and the system is very flexible.

Payment providers

Your website needs a payment provider – someone to take the money from your customers. That money is then paid to you. There are many different payment providers available, but they all do the same job. WorldPay, PayPal and Stripe are the most common ones our customers use. We usually recommend Stripe as it has a competitive charging structure and integrates easily with WordPress websites.

Imagery – choosing the best photographs

Top-quality imagery will sell your products so please don’t settle for those grainy low-resolution photos you took on your phone. Let us come and take photographs of your products that will really appeal to your customers.

Why we like thinking outside of the box

For us, creating an online shop doesn’t stop there. We now want to try and better understand your business processes. If we can do that, we may be able to further extend your website to support you in running your business.

Some examples of the types of things we can do include:

Creating an interactive build-your-own tool for the BIL Group.
Developing a back-office for Kingsley Smythe to help them deliver their orders in a more efficient way.
Writing a stock-picking progressive web application (PWA) for The Malt Miller. This runs on a smartphone, scans QR codes from packing slips and helps workers locate products in the warehouse.
Making suggestions for new features and functionality that we think would be of benefit.

We enjoy nothing more than having a good think about how we can use technology to make life more efficient!

Hosting, maintenance and support options

Remember that we’re a full-service agency so we have hosting, maintenance and support contracts available to help support your shop.

Creating long-lasting relationships

As we’ve already said, we’re not interested in delivering short-term solutions where we just build you a shop framework and leave you to it. We are always looking to develop longer-term business relationships with our clients and we want to see you (and help you) succeed.

We believe that we can create an e-commerce website that really works for your business – give us a try and see for yourself!

"It has been a pleasure to work with Pink Fish on the redesign of our website. They took the time to properly understand what we wanted to achieve and gave invaluable input on the journey to get us there. They have truly worked in partnership with us to get the best results and worked hard to find solutions to meet our brief. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Pink Fish. They are professional, flexible and provided exactly what we needed.”

Kate Myrie

Shalbourne Private Health Care, Great Western Hospitals NHS Trust

"It’s refreshing to work with a company that genuinely cares about its customers and the service it provides. I will always recommend you guys to my contacts for this reason."

Kerry Davies

Managing Director

Case studies

Read more about some of our projects below. If you think we're the people to talk to for your next project, please get in touch.

Get in touch

If you think we can help with your next project, please drop us a line or call us. We’d love to meet with you to see how we could work together.

Our offices in Stratton St Margaret are easy to reach with free parking right outside the door.

Telephone:
Alternatively, drop us an email @ Pink Fish