Introduction

With online sales continuing to boom, they increased 20 per cent during November and December 2004 alone, an ecommerce web site is fast becoming essential for many businesses to remain competitive. Research outfit Interactive Media in Retail Group IMRG) found that half of the UK population shopped online in the run up to Christmas last year, spending more than £3bn.

Selling online reduces your business expenses, provides added convenience for your customers and opens the door to a global market for your products and services. In today's marketplace small and large businesses alike are discovering that the real payoff of an online presence is electronic commerce - which leads to increased turnover and improved margins.

However, to succeed as an online merchant you have to understand where your products fit within the competitive landscape and be clear about your online sales objectives. In order to do that, you need to know how to reach your virtual customers and how best to meet their needs.

• You must be selling the right product at the right price. If it doesn't sell normally, why should it sell online.
• Your site must look clean and stylish, be easy to navigate and the visitor must be able to find what they want quickly.
• Visitors must be able to buy the product with the minimum of fuss, ideally no more than three stages, select product, provide delivery details and payment information, confirm purchase.
• The site needs to be promoted in the same manner as you would a shop or any other retail outlet, i.e. direct marketing, advertising, PR etc. Obviously you will include online marketing and email etc.
• Finally, sales made online must exceed the customer expectations, if you say it will be delivered in 7 days, it MUST be delivered in 7 days. Reliable delivery and shipment will have a huge impact on whether customers return to your site and buy again.

How Miura Can Help

Miura Design provide the technical expertise, experience and understanding of ecommerce needed to design and build an online ecommerce presence that will make your virtual store a success. We offer both managed and self managed services so that those companies who want to outsource their e-commerce can, while for those who are more hands on can run their e-commerce stores themselves.

All of our ecommerce solutions use advanced feature rich, database powered ecommerce software making it suitable for selling anything from 10 or 10,000 products. To see examples of our ecommerce solution, click here.

To request more information please use our online enquiry form or call us on 0845 226 0793.