Online shop benefits.

Are you considering starting on online business, or expanding your physical store to online?

Have you suffered due to the COVID-19 pandemic? One positive to come out of the pandemic is that many people have now changed the way they spend - and this is set to stay!

01.

Overview.

Over the past 10 years or so, we’ve seen a huge increase in online sales, and of course, with the COVID-19 pandemic, online has been the only source of income for many retailers - with most, seeing a huge spike in sales.

If you didn’t have an e-commerce platform during this period, you may very well have suffered.

02.

Get paid instantly.

By using e-commerce, you have the ability to process transactions instantly depending on which payment processor you use.

Payments can literally be cleared into your account within just a few seconds, all without you having to anything.

03.

Boost your sales.

As mentioned above, if you have a physical store, you’re limited to customers through your door - with an e-commerce website, your customer reach has now expanded immensely, which in turn, allows your sales to increase too.

04.

Reach New Customers.

Every business wants to attract new customers, but with a physical store, this can be difficult. With an e-commerce website, this is no longer a restriction!

As your online customer base grows, and so does the number of customers that would rather purchase online, than ‘pop’ into your store through the front door.

05.

Sell Internationally.

No longer are you limited to customers in your town/city, you’re now able to reach customers across the country, and of course, if you wish, across the globe.

With an e-commerce store, you can even show product prices in the customer chasing currency and have specific shipping options per country too.

06.

Showcase your best sellers.

Have some products that you know sell well? Then you can showcase these on the website.

Want to upsell some products (gloves with a hat for instance)? Then you can upsell the gloves at the checkout, or after a customer has added a hat to their online basket.

07.

Open 24/7.

If you don’t use an online store, you’re limited to your business hours. With an e-commerce website, you’re open 24/7. Your online store will handle everything, including taking the payments/shipping options.

All you need to do is come in the following morning, package the orders up, and ship them off to your happy customers.

08.

Retarget or Remarket to Customers.

With various methods, including Facebook Pixel / Google Tag, you can offer customers a personalised experience via your website, based on their purchase history.

Based on this history (and via information gained by Facebook / Google etc), you can target new and existing customers with products them may like. You can also specifically target customers that have purchased from you in the past, added a product to their basket, but never followed through with the order, or have purchased/viewed a product / similar product via a different website altogether.

09.

Conclusion

If you have a physical, bricks and mortar store, then a nopCommerce e-commerce platform really would be a great addition. The Internet has revolutionised the way we shop and is such a powerful platform providing a broad awareness of e-commerce websites.

Year on year, there are millions of people searching for products and services every day and as such, online shopping is increasing year on year too and is being seen as a convenient method to purchase products, where making a purchase at any time in the day is becoming the norm.

2018/2019 - 2019/2020

Side by side comparison of the periods 2018/19 through 2019/20 for one of my clients on-line stores. Nearly a 210% revenue increase over the same period as a result of of the COVID-19 pandemic.

e-commerce conversions - test

Acquisition Comparison

As you can see, during the pandemic, there was a drastic increase in online performance, resulting in a 210% increase in revenue, which translates to a £206K increase in revenue over the previous 2018/19 period. This simply wouldn't have been possible without an online store, and with the physical store having to close often, it could have been catastrophic.

e-commerce conversions - test

nopCommerce features & benefits.

What does a nopCommerce store offer?

Upload an unlimited number of products, manage several stores from one admin panel, and increase the sales with built-in marketing tools.

A responsive mobile webstore is a must for any online business owner these days, as 82% of smartphone users decide to buy something while surfing the Internet on their smartphones.

My platform supports a mobile version of your website with a compelling, feature-rich and graphically pleasing storefront, and it provides means for retailers to immediately deliver relevant offers, promotions and products. The mobile-responsive version works on any connected device, without requiring extra development or add-ons. It is free and available out of the box.

A multi-store feature enables you to run more than one store from a single nopCommerce installation. This means you can host more than one frontend store on different domains and manage all admin operations from your single administration panel. You can create unique online stores for multiple brands, products, B2B, B2C, affiliates, co-branded stores and more. You can also quickly launch micro-stores for promotional campaigns.

The most convenient feature is that every online store shares a single database: you can share catalog data between stores, and your customers can log-in to all of your stores using the same credentials.

Multi-vendor and drop shipping support enables you to sell online without having to stock inventory or ship orders.

When drop shipping is enabled, each product is assigned to a particular vendor whose details are stored. Once an order is placed, an email is sent to the vendor of each product in the order. The email includes products, quantities, etc. The vendor then ships the item to a customer on behalf of the merchant, who typically pays each of his/her vendors at the end of the month.

Products from multiple independent vendors appear in the common product catalog and your website visitors can shop at one web store even if your products are supplied by hundreds of different vendors from all over the world. Each vendor can be provided with administrator panel access to manage their products, review sales reports and order details regarding their products. Vendors do not interfere with each other's activity.

Product attributes
Create as many attributes for your products as you need, such as size and color — each with its own SKU, price, weight, image and stock level. Store owners can add text options to products for shoppers to fill in, such as initials for monogrammed products. The shoppers can also upload files, for example, for custom prints on shirts.

Product comparison
Comparing products side by side removes the guesswork from your customers and facilitates their research, hence, improving the time spent on, and odds of, adding a product to the cart.

Stock management
Our inventory management allows store owners to discern physical stock and available quantities. You can easily manage backorder and pre-order status for each product. Multiple warehouses, partial deliveries, and stock management by product attributes (such as color and size) are supported.

Prices
In nopCommerce, price tools go beyond simple price tag creation. Store owners can set different prices for different groups of their customers, hide prices for extra-valuable items and make customers contact a sales team by enabling “call for price”. nopCommerce also supports “enter your price” functionality for donations.

Downloadable products
nopCommerce supports license and user agreement attachments for downloadable products, such as music files or ebooks. A store owner can choose a download activation type: "When order payment status is Paid" or "Manual activation".

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the visibility of a website in search results. Our search engine optimization tool helps you get higher search rankings, meaning more organic traffic going to your store.

Search engine friendly URLs
To make store pages more search engine-friendly, a store owner has full access to keyword tags and customized URLs management sections. nopCommerce also supports product pages with SEO-friendly names out of the box.

Sitemap
There are two popular versions of sitemaps, and nopCommerce supports both of them. An XML sitemap is a structured format of a site that a visitor doesn't need to see. The sitemap gives information about the pages on site to search engines: their relative importance to each other, and how often they are updated. HTML sitemaps are designed to help users find content on a page. They don't need to include each subpage. HTML sitemaps help both visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Microdata
Microdata is a specification to embed machine-readable data in HTML documents. Integrating microdata into your website's code offers a number of potential advantages. First, microdata can give the search engine spiders more context for the type of information on the website and the way the site should be indexed and ranked. Another benefit of microdata is the creation of "rich snippets", which display more information on search result pages than traditional listings. nopCommerce supports Twitter and Open Graph (Facebook) META tags.

Localizable URLs
nopCommerce allows a store owner to localize URLs. URL localization increases the chance of matching search results in other cultures/languages.

Breadcrumbs
nopCommerce supports breadcrumbs. They ease navigation within the search engine results page, which makes your listing look more attractive and trustworthy. Also, when it comes to huge websites, breadcrumbs can be a great way to help users identify where they are located.

URL Canonicalization
URL canonicalization is used to reduce indexing of duplicated pages and it makes a site more crawlable by setting a store URL to the canonical (preferred) URL for each category and product pages.

Google Analytics integration
nopCommerce is integrated with Google Analytics. The eCommerce transaction tracking tool automatically connects your Google Analytics data with customer transactions.

nopCommerce supports two types of checkout used in most modern webstores:

Anonymous checkout allows customers to checkout without creating an account. Many customers prefer this option as it allows them to finish the purchase quicker.

One-page checkout dramatically reduces the steps required in the checkout process and also helps to increase revenue and conversion rates by making the checkout easier for customers.

Checkout attributes. At the checkout you can provide customers with various options. For example. you can gift wrap products or personalize with messages.

nopCommerce has a variety of features for marketing campaigns:

Reward Points System
The reward points program allows you to offer points earned on the money spent at your store. A customer can then redeem the points for additional products at your store.

Related products
Displaying related products is a great tool to upsell while customers browse a product page or before they check out.

Discounts and coupons
The discount amount can either be a fixed value or a percent off, e.g. $10.00 off or 20% off. You can specify a start date and an end date when a coupon is valid. Discounts can be assigned to products, entire categories, shipping, order totals, and more. They can also be assigned to specific customer roles. nopCommerce supports quantity discounts (tier prices), “N times only” and “N times per customer” discounts, and other various discount requirements (e.g. “Has one of these products in the cart” or “Spent XX amount”).

Newsletter and emails
Sending newsletters to customers is a great way to let them know about your products and upcoming sales. They sent out to inform your audience of the latest news, tips, or updates about your products or company. nopCommerce has rich built-in functionality to manage email campaigns.

Content
nopCommerce supports news, blog, forums, polls, and custom pages (topics).

Gift cards
Gift card functionality is something that every merchant needs, no matter if running an online or offline business. nopCommerce supports two types of gift cards: gift cards delivered via e-mail (virtual) and classic gift cards sent via post (physical).

Product reviews and ratings
Product reviews are one of the best forms of marketing. Asking for feedback on products gives customers a voice, and at the same time lets potential customers know what other people think about your products. nopCommerce also supports the review helpfulness feature (“Was this review helpful to you?”).

Product comparison sites
nopCommerce is fully integrated with all major product feeds - Google Shopping, PriceGrabber and Yahoo Shopping, and become.com

Affiliate program
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a store owner rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate''s own marketing efforts.

Additional extensions
In addition to out-of-the-box features, you can find many other marketing tools on our marketplace such as, product export to Facebook, SMS notifications to shoppers, etc.

nopCommerce allows you to accept all major credit and debit cards. A store can be set to authorize only or auth-capture credit card modes. nopCommerce supports refund (and partial refund) and void functionality.

Every country has its own payment preferences, that's why nopCommerce also allows you to limit payment methods per country. nopCommerce has official technology partnership relations with major payment processors across the globe. This means exclusive marketing offers and pricing packages available for nopCommerce users.

nopCommerce supports various shipping requirements and settings.

Highlighted features include:

Calculation
nopCommerce supports flexible calculation mechanisms: a store can be configured for free shipping over $X, shipping rates can be based on order weight or order totals, additional shipping charges can be specified per product, and shipping discounts (percent or fixed amount) can be created. Certain customer groups can be marked for free shipping.
nopCommerce allows you to limit available shipping methods per country, or apply "no shipping required" (e.g. for services).

Addresses
nopCommerce allows your customers to give two different addresses for billing and shipping, so they can easily send items as gifts.

Estimate shipping.
It helps customers to estimate shipping cost before the checkout process starts. Customers just enter country, state and zip code information - available shipping options and their estimated costs will be shown.

Pickup Points
nopCommerce supports in-store pickup. This feature allows a store owner to configure pickup locations where customers can receive parcels.

Packaging slips
Multiple shipments per order and tracking numbers are supported. Customers can easily track where their shipments are right now.

Shipping methods
A store owner can define custom shipping methods (e.g. Ground, Next Day, 2nd Day, etc) or use popular shipping carriers (e.g. UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc). nopCommerce is integrated with major shipping carriers. Your customers can choose their preferred carrier based on experience, price, or destination.

Tax calculations in nopCommerce offer a considerable amount of flexibility to meet your store's legal requirements, your preferences, and expectations of your customers. Store owners can easily manage all settings and details in the administration panel.

nopCommerce has great tools to provide high-quality customer service in your webstore:

GDPR support
nopCommerce is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

External authentication
Allows your customers to register and login using such services as OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Wishlist
Wishlist enables customers to store products for purchasing at a later time.

RTL support
RTL means Right-To-Left and is for users who use an alphabet that is read & written from another direction, sach as Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.

EU cookie law
Effective from May 2012, the EU (European Union) cookie law requires websites to gain permission from users before planting cookies.

Customer attributes
Any built-in customer attribute (e.g. Country or Address fields) can be disabled or enabled. A store owner can also create additional attributes, if required.

Security and permissions
A store owner can configure specific rules and permissions for different categories of users.

GDPR support
nopCommerce meets all the requirements of the European Union Laws. We track all the legislative changes and make updates to the platform accordingly.

PCI DSS compliance
Meets all PCI Compliance requirements. 50+ integrated payment methods and gateways to transmit credit card data securely.

Built on secure technologies
Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core framework brings built-in security. But when you use PHP-based platforms, it is necessary to design a protection system from scratch to maintain a relative level of security.

Being developed with .NET Core, the platform can be run on Windows, Linux or Mac. Its architecture follows well-known software patterns and the best security practices, and as such, is fully customizable. Pluggable architecture makes it easy to develop custom functionality and follow any business requirements.

There's also a huge array of free and paid for plugins available.

Google Shopping Feed, Facebook Pixel & Facebook Shop feed, Amazon product feed, plus eBay product inventory.

Blog, News, Forum, product reviews and reward points.

GDPR compliance, Abandoned basket reminders, SEO Automatisation, Sales Campaigns & much much more.

Brands I've produced work for

I've worked with and for a great deal of well known brands over the years.

Who I Work With

I work with a diverse range, from new, start-up companies, established companies looking to expand their online presence and also agencies.

01

Start-up Companies

Start-up companies looking for their first online presence. I'll help guide you through the many pitfalls when it comes to website design, and deliver your very first website, that engages your customers.

02

Established Companies

Established Companies, looking to expand onto the web, or improve / develop a new website to reflect it's current position in the market.

03

Agencies

For over the 22 + years I've been freelancing, I've worked with some of the biggest and longest established digital agencies in the country. Unfortunately for 99% of them, I'm unable to disclose details of projects due to NDA's.

Get in touch.

Drop me an email about your project - I’d love to hear from you.

Like a Chat?

  • 07712 288478
  • craig@untiedshoes.co.uk

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