Scope
We begin with a 0.5-1 hour virtual or in-person meeting to clearly determine your eCommerce site requirements. As an eCommerce development company, BSO Digital uses WooCommerce as our preferred eCommerce selling platform. BSO Digital offers a variety of convenient eCommerce web design packages to suit every business type and budget size.
These packages include a custom-designed home page, shop/category pages, and product pages. They can also include product loading, basic/advanced shipping calculation, and various payment gateways setup. Based on your requirements, we may recommend a custom eCommerce web development quote for more complex online shopping stores.
Project Brief
After scoping your shopping cart project, we will host a more in-depth 2 hour virtual or in-person meeting. This usually includes your appointed project manager and a website designer. The website designer will run through a design questionnaire that will identify the problems, goals, target audience, competitors, overall style, and any other required information to get the project up and running.
Your appointed project manager will be your main point of contact from the beginning of the project to the end. They’ll help establish a project timeline, explain the milestones, and estimate a delivery date based on the approved project brief. Our project managers have extensive experience delivering fantastic eCommerce solutions!
Visual Design
Existing brand elements often shape your new website’s visual design. This includes logos, brand colours, fonts, and icons. Our eCommerce web designers will also take into account your requirements and any information provided in the project brief. Our designers always follow the design thinking methodology for eCommerce website design.
They’ll begin with producing low fidelity wireframes for each mockup included in your website package or custom quote. This can help clients visualise the new hierarchy and allow for quick and easy changes on the fly. After the wireframes have been approved, the designer will move on to the high fidelity mockups. These will represent how your new website will look and feel like a finished product.
Development
Once the template mockups have been approved, BSO Digital’s eCommerce development team will begin building the website. This process usually takes 2-4 weeks depending on the project size. Our eCommerce web developers specialise in WooCommerce web development and collectively boast decades of coding experience in WordPress.
BSO Digital will ensure that your new Australian eCommerce website looks and feels like the approved mockups. Your new website will be SEO ready, built for speed, and conversion focused. BSO Digital utilises our very own lightweight theme that is built upon to suit your needs. Nearly everything you see on the page will be easily editable without any IT experience or further coding needed.
Testing & Delivery
You will be given full access to the staging website well before the go-live date. This allows your business time to internally review and test out the shopping experience. This includes how the website functions on desktop and mobile. BSO Digital prides itself on always building a user-friendly website that anyone can maintain and update themselves.
Our eCommerce developers will thoroughly test your new WordPress online store on various browsers, screen sizes, and smart devices. This includes browsers like Edge, Firefox, Safari and smart devices like the iPhone, Samsung, Google. BSO Digital is a full-service company, as a result, we can also host your new website on WordPress specific servers or take it live on your chosen platform.
Ongoing Support
BSO Digital can provide training virtually or in-person. We will cover all WordPress and WooCommerce basics. This includes how to update your website, manage orders, upload new products, create coupons, and more! Your new website will be extremely easy to maintain yourself, but we can always help out if needed.
Over 3.5 million websites use WooCommerce as their preferred eCommerce platform. This is because it’s very user-friendly and surprisingly easy for anyone to perform updates on a variety of devices. If you do get stuck, BSO Digital offers ongoing support in the form of maintenance plans. They include organic and paid marketing services.
No Recurring Charges
Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce, and Squarespace; WooCommerce boasts no recurring chargers and most plugins are free!
Limitless Integrations
You can integrate with pretty much every platform you might need such as Paypal, MailChimp, Google Ads, and more.
SEO Optimised
WooCommerce and WordPress have both been built using code optimised for SEO. Added SEO plugins can also be installed.
Mobile Friendly
Your eCommerce store will look fantastic on desktop, tablet, and mobile. It will also work on all popular browsers.
Safe & Secure
BSO Digital will purchase and install a free SSL certificate onto your site to keep customer details and transactions secure.
100% Scaleable
Adding additional features to your store is relatively easy without any extra coding. This includes bookings and subscriptions.
An eCommerce website refers to any website that allows you to purchase and sell physical or digital goods online. The term eCommerce is short for electronic commerce. These types of websites usually allow the business to add, edit, and delete products, update orders, set shipping prices, and accept payments.
A typical eCommerce website will perform three tasks. The server is responsible for the functionality of the website. This includes things like displaying products. The website itself will process transactions ( this is usually done through a 3rd party plugin like Stripe or Paypal ) and finally, the database keeps track of your inventory, content, images, users etc.
It’s recommended that all websites have an SSL certificate to protect the data transferring through the website; such as login details. This is especially true for eCommerce websites because the data can sometimes involve credit cards and other highly sensitive information like mailing addresses and phone numbers.
An eCommerce website that’s utilising WooCommerce is extremely easy to run, maintain, and update. WooCommerce has been purpose-built for WordPress and is super simple to operate for any experience level. You also have the benefit of being able to update your website from anywhere via the WooCommerce mobile app or web app. WooCommerce runs on all modern browsers and smart devices.
One thing to be aware of is where your eCommerce site is hosted. Depending on the platform, how many products you sell, and how many visitors your website gets, you may need a specific type of website hosting. For small stores, most shared website hosting plans should be fine, but big stores usually require dedicated hosting to run smoothly.
Ecommerce websites provide the ultimate convenience for consumers. They are available 24/7 and also require little to no effort to use. Store owners can easily reach new customers, cater to niche markets, and make sales without lifting a finger.
Ecommerce stores aren’t just restricted to selling physical goods, they can also be used to sell digital goods. You can sell online subscriptions, memberships, vouchers, courses, and more!
Existing brick and mortar businesses can even synchronise their stock levels, orders, and users to achieve a full circle selling strategy. This is just one of many examples of the benefits of having an online store.
WooCommerce is the most recommended platform for WordPress. Beginners can learn how to use it very easily. It’s also the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin because it boasts a variety of seamless integrations. This includes stock management, digital marketing, payments, customer service, and shipping options.
WooCommerce was made specifically for WordPress and is one of their most recommended plugins on the plugin store. WooCommerce is also completely free and is used by millions of websites on the internet. This includes Sony ( Playstation ), Time Magazine, CNN, Disney, Spotify, and many more!
The reason why so many popular websites use WordPress is that it’s free, easy to update, developer-friendly, scaleable, and customisable. Unlike other website builder platforms like Shopify and Wix, you own anything built on WordPress and you can easily take it with you if you decide to change website hosting or website developer.
eCommerce websites can cost between $1,000 to $100,000. It all depends on how or what framework it’s built on, the functionality your business needs, and the popularity of the coding language used.
Some frameworks charge a monthly fee to use them while others are completely free. WordPress for example is open source, meaning they don’t charge for developers to use their framework. Other frameworks like Wix for example, charge a monthly fee to their users. Both frameworks provide a user-friendly backend that allows you to easily make updates to your website.
The functionality required is another thing to consider. Freelancers might only need a basic eCommerce website, while established businesses may require something more complicated. Shopify for example usually charges businesses a monthly fee for each additional function or app that’s installed. On the contrary, WordPress provides millions of free plugins that can add extra functionality to anyone’s online store.
The last thing to think about is how the website is coded. Some websites are coded from scratch using a variety of coding languages, while others work off a framework. Some coding languages become less popular over time, so the price of maintaining an eCommerce website with legacy code like ASP, for example, can increase greatly and get quite expensive because there are fewer programmers trained in or doing that type of coding. On the other hand, some coding languages like PHP have remained popular for decades and is almost universally used by most modern websites these days.
WooCommerce comes out of the box with everything you need in most cases. This includes account creation, shipping rules, email notifications, product landing pages, and much more. Additional functionality can be added easily via free or premium plugins. Or you can hire a web developer to get a plugin for your specific needs. Because WooCommerce runs on common coding languages like PHP and Javascript; this can be relatively inexpensive.
WooCommerce is also developer-friendly and has been built with a REST API. This means it can virtually integrate with any online platform fairly easily. Some basic integration examples include Stripe, PayPal, Xero, MailChimp, Google Ads, Facebook and more! But as mentioned WooCommerce is limitless in regards to integrations.
A successful eCommerce website is made up of many different things. Basic things like having product descriptions and categorising your products is a good start. Organic SEO, social, and paid marketing is also beneficial to get your products in front of potential buyers.
The look and feel of your website is also very important. Things like colour, font, and images are used to convince users that your business is trustworthy and worth buying from. Your eCommerce design should appeal to your target market, be easy to navigate and provide a overall positive experience for your users.
Another thing to consider is the load time. Nobody likes to wait for a website to load and this can result in a high number of users leaving your website immediately. This all comes down to having your website hosted on the right server that’s designed for your framework.
Adding a search bar to your website can also be beneficial. Reducing the number of steps your user has to take to achieve their goal will increase the likelihood they’ll purchase your product. Allowing your users to checkout as a guest speeds things up and is generally recommended for most online shops.
