Out of every £1 spent by British shoppers 17p is now going to on-line ecommerce retailers, you have to ask yourself, can your business really afford not to take advantage of these sales?  Despite the credit crunch the total spent online continues to grow massively year on year, savvy shoppers are now looking online for those ‘credit crunch beating bargains’. Ecommerce growth is expected to remain strong throughout 2009, driven by rising fuel costs, falling disposable income and smarter shopping habits.

If you already have a traditional shop and want to expand onto the web, or if you are just starting up as an internet only ecommerce trader, partnering with Fisheye will give your business maximum sales prospects with the image it deserves.

Fisheye have proven experience with ecommerce sites, with our customers online sales totalling over £2 million last year, we are in the right position to take your store from concept to success.

Just think, your new ecommerce website could be creating you new sales within minutes of going live, and can keep producing sales 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year.

If you hadn’t guessed by now an Ecommerce Website is a site which allows customers to buy a product and securely pay for it on the internet with the owner of the ecommerce site having little or no intervention with the sale.

Ecommerce solutions are also sometimes referred to as shopping carts; we like to separate the two names as they do have slightly different meanings. An Ecommerce website is a database driven website that controls all parts of an on-line ecommerce shop, from product information, order tracking, right through to stock control. Whereas a shopping cart is really only a facility for a user to select an item or several items and pay for them online and doesn’t necessary do anything more. Shopping carts can normally be added as a ‘bolt-on’ to existing websites, and are often cheaper to implement. The downside of course is their limited functionality compared to an ecommerce site; however they are perfectly good for low volume sales or sites with limited products.

Selling on-line using ecommerce is not terribly different to selling face to face or over the phone, with one exception, you need gain the trust of your potential customer straight away and give them the information they are looking for as quickly as possible.

With an ecommerce site you don’t have the time that you would selling face to face to convince the customer to part with their hard earned cash, your ecommerce site has got to do this in a few seconds, as it’s much easier for your customers to click over to one of your competitor’s sites, than it would be to traipse to another shop on the high street.

Relevant content is crucial in ecommerce, make sure you have as much available as possible, give your customer’s information at their fingertips, and why not use PDF brochures or specifications? Make sure your ecommerce site uses stock indicators; it’s proven that ecommerce sites with in stock information sell far more than sites without them.

Displaying nice crystal clear images of your products is really important; speak to us about our image enhancement and product photography service. Your customers want to be sure of what they are going to get, so lots of useful images are a great help.

You have put in a lot of effort to get your customer to decide to buy, it follows that the payment or checkout process must be as streamlined and secure as possible, you don’t want to loose them now.

Usually an ecommerce website will use a payment gateway to process credit card payments, gone are the days that you can collect the payments details yourself and process them offline with a PDQ, as banks have cracked down heavily on security in recent years and rightly so. By using a third party payment gateway to collect your payment you are reducing risks substantially.  These payment gateways act as intermediaries between your ecommerce store, your customer’s card, and all the financial processing in between.

Our ecommerce websites are ready for integration with hundreds of gateways, although we particularly recommend Sage Pay (formally Protx), Google Checkout and Paypal as a good starting point.

Our ecommerce web sites have a web browser merchant login area or ‘back end’ where you have access to the order tracking system, customer details, customer groups and stock control, not to mention full control your product catalogue. When a customer places an order on your ecommerce site you will receive an email from the website to let you know, you can then login to find out more details, and communicate directly with the customer about their ecommerce purchase.

All our ecommerce sites have the latest SSL Certificates (for data secure data encryption) with 128 bit point to verify secure encryption. Customers will see the padlock and https: to indicate the site is secure, and with a click to verify icon on your site it offers your customers added reassurance. 

If you have concerns or questions regarding ecommerce website security, new PCI Compliance regulations or payment systems, please call for a free consultation.

We thought you may find it useful to see what our ecommerce solutions can do, so we’ve made a big list of features below. It’s quite possible you will not be interested or make use of some of these functions - don’t worry, all our ecommerce stores are tailored to your exact requirements. On the other hand if you are looking for a specific ecommerce feature that’s not listed below, please give us a call; we’ve probably at some point in the past already worked on it.

Reading through lists of specifications is all very well (and boring) so if you want to have a hands on demo, we can let you lose on our demonstration ecommerce site, and we will even talk you through it, please call if you would like to give it a spin.

• Customers can search & browse their personal order history
• Integrated configurable store product search
• Real time order tracking
• Customer can choose between account registration and express checkout
• Fast Lane Checkout mode for quick and intuitive checkout
• Customisable e-mail notifications and invoices
• Customer Wish lists (for wedding lists etc)
• "Send to a friend" functionality (sends product link to another person)
• Ability to for customer's to save their cart
• Newsletter management for multiple lists, edit/import/export of subscribers, news archive for customers
• Multiple customer types with unique pricing for every customer type
• Memberships and special pricing
• Printable ecommerce invoices
• Second address line for user profiles

• Unlimited number of products
• Unlimited number of categories
• Unlimited category tiers
• Products can be assigned to unlimited number of categories
• Ability to modify multiple products simultaneously
• Members-only categories (restrict categories or individual products to certain member types i.e trade customers)
• Featured Products modules
• Automated display of bestsellers
• Related products - up selling and cross selling
• Automatic currency conversion or absolute currency pricing
• Configurable search by title, description, category, SKU, price and weight

• Unlimited product options, product variants with optional price modifiers
• Unlimited custom input fields for products
• Unlimited number of product images
• Optional zoom image functions
• Ability to display product detailed images in popup windows
• Moderated product reviews and ratings
• Add videos to your product page
• Add PDF downloads to your product page
• Sell downloadable products like software.
• Add favourite links (dig it, face book etc).

• Discount coupon codes and gift certificates
• Full inventory control
• "Out of Stock" Messages
• Setup the possibility of taking backorders and preorders
• Allow customers to buy backorder items with in stock, and split shipments
• Quantity discounts
• Retail and wholesale prices
• Limit minimal order amount
  

• Unlimited number of custom-defined delivery methods
• Flat rate, weight, order total and per-item based shipping
• Different weight limits for different delivery methods
• Mark-ups for real-time shipping
• Mark your products as "free shipping" products
• Promotional "free shipping" coupons to your customers
• Add handling/freight charges
• Handle international, domestic and local shipping
• Ability to clone a zone and all zone information
• Restrict shipping by location
• Allow your customers to choose delivery methods
• Support for downloadable goods (e-goods)
• Customisable tax calculations
• Product-specific taxes
• Taxes & shipping fees depending on client's location
• Printable shipping labels

• Comprehensive statistics:
  • Number of orders
  • Number of customers
  • Product views
  • Category views
  • Products removed from cart by customers
  • Sales by product / best sellers
  • Total sales
  • Client environment settings
  • Statistics on search patterns customers use when searching products
• Searchable order data
• Search engine & incoming traffic tracker: the cart keeps referrer data for all customers
• Shipment/fulfilment interface
• Export sales & customer data for use in a spreadsheet
• Optional Sage integration (bi-directional updating of products, orders, customers).

• Custom META tags for product, category and static pages
• Custom URLs for product, category and static pages
• Customer referrer info is stored in database
• Search engine optimization options group
• Page contents is placed at the top of the page HTML-code
• Search Engine Friendly URLs for product, category and static pages
• Google Analytics integration & Google Ecommerce Tracking
  

• All customer's data is securely stored in a database
• Greet regular visitors
• Offer Discounts to Registered customers
• Returning customers do not have to enter their data again
• Registered customers can access history of their orders
• Built-in newsletter engine
• Export of newsletter subscribers
• Real-time order tracking for registered customers

• Password-protected administrative access
• Change almost anything about your store, products pricing, categories
• All changes are real-time
• Control the cart from anywhere in the world using your web browser
• Unlimited number of admin accounts
• Support for restricted fulfilment administration accounts
• Ability for administrator to take manual telephone orders through the admin section
• Optional module for modification or amendments to customer orders