E-Commerce

E-commerce is in the broadest sense anything that supports or contributes to a commercial transaction across the internet. This can include introducing potential customers to your business, but more often it refers to the facility for buying and selling directly online.

Credit Card. Taking payments for products and services online can be achieved in many different ways. We've experience using 3 different approaches.

Sales can be managed in a variety of ways online, from huge bespoke systems used by supermarket retailers to using a single PayPal button on a site to sell a single product. And of course there are all sorts of options in between.

Some of our clients wish to sell a small range of products on their website and to do this we recommend PayPal. Seasons Florists, Sally Pinhey Watercolours, Hundred Aker Wood Pottery all use PayPal as a simple and easy to use method of selling their wares to customers all over the world. PayPal is an established brand and has a familiar interface that lots of people feel confident using. We create "buttons" on the clients' sites that set up the transaction with PayPal and then the customer can make the payment using the PayPal system. Everyone can then be confident about the transaction being handled securely, effeciently and economically.

Actinic. This is a fully feature shopping cart system.

Some of our clients prefer to use an off-the-shelf e-commerce system. John Gerard Wines and GrassRoutes Leisure and the Caravan Accessory Store all use Actinic to process their web sales. This is a complete inventory management system with built in stock control, order processing, invoicing and customer management. We supply the design input for these sites and help with the initial configuration of the system on the web server, and sometimes offer a little training to help get the most from the package. This requires a third party payment processor like SecPay, Protx or integration with an offline payment provider like Streamline.

One of our clients, ACAT, has a bespoke payment system set up on the site that we dovetailed with SecPay to take payments for course fees, membership fees, event bookings and product sales. We designed this facility from scratch to process these types of payments within a bigger online office administration system. This gives ACAT ultimate flexibility to take payments for many different products and services and to process them all in the context of their overall office record-keeping.

PayPal. It's easy, fast and reliable to use PayPal for online payment handling.

We are happy to work in any of these three ways to add e-commerce to a client's website. We're also happy to discuss which option might be best to meet a particular client's needs.

If you're thinking about e-commerce and would like to bounce ideas around then do give a ring on 01300 320076 or email us and we'll call you back jon@alacrify.co.uk

Alacrify Ltd. 01300 320076. jon@alacrify.co.uk