The definition of an E-commerce Website is a site which allows customers to buy a product on-line and securely pay for that product over the internet with the owner or Merchant having little or no intervention.

E-commerce solutions are also sometimes referred to as shopping carts, we like to separate the two names as they do have quite different meanings. An Ecommerce website is a database driven website that controls all parts of an on-line shop, product information, order tracking, stock control, Etc. A shopping cart is really only the facility to be able to select an item or several items and process payment for them and doesn’t necessary do anything more. Shopping carts can normally be added to existing non ecommerce sites but will have limited or no interaction with the rest of the site. The following pages refer mainly to full e-commerce sites, but many of the points raised bellow also apply to shopping carts.

In 2005 consumers spent £92 Billion online, over half of the British population shops on the internet and the latest estimation by TechWeb estimates that online consumer retail spending this year will grow by 26 percent over the £92 billion spent in 2005. Half the world's population has access to the Web and these figures are growing by the minute.

As a Merchant or store owner can you really afford not to be a part of this revolution? If you have an established retail operation and want to expand onto the web, or if you are starting up and will just be trading on the web, partnering with Fisheye will give your business maximum sales prospects with the image it deserves.

Just think, your new website can be creating you new sales within minutes of going live, and will keep producing sales 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year, with minimal or no operating costs, unlike staff, your website will not take sick days, be late or go on holiday!

Selling on-line is not vastly different to selling face to face or over the phone, with one exception, you need to give your customer as much information about the product there and then, most customers will not hang if all the information they need is not readily available.

Make sure you have as much relevant text content available, and PDF brochures or specifications available to download. Stock indicators are also useful tools, they allow your customer to see what is in stock.

Displaying good images of your products is really important, we recommend you consider using our image enhancement service, or better still why not use our new 360 degree photography and product spinner service. You can spin a product around on screen so you can see all sides as if you are in a real shop!

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

The normal method for easy and secure payment processing on your e-commerce website is to use a payment gateway. A payment gateway is a separate service and acts as an intermediary between your ecommerce site or shopping cart and all the financial networks involved with the transaction, including the customers credit card issuer and your merchant account. Think of it as a EFTPOS terminal in cyberspace. It checks for validity, encrypts transaction details, ensures they are sent to the correct destination and then decrypts the responses which are sent back to the merchant.

We integrate and are resellers for payment gateways such as Netbanx, WorldPay, Velocity Pay, Bucks Net, Authorise .net, SECPay, Netaxept, HSBC, Protx and Secure Trading and as such often gain preferential rates for our customers.

Our 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. When a customer places an order on your site you will receive an email from the website to indicate this, you can then login to find out more details, or just simply dispatch the goods based on the information on the email.

It is also possible to take off-line payments if you have an existing PDQ, companies that already use PDQ’s may wish to continue to use this method, it will probably give you preferential rates but may be less secure from your point of view. You can log in to the ‘back end’ of the site to obtain the credit card details and process orders in the normal manner.

All our sites have either a shared or their own SSL Certificate with 128 bit point to verify secure encryption. Customers will see the padlock and https: to indicate the site is secure, if you opt for your own certificate you can have a click to verify icon on your site, offering your customers added reassurance.

The back end of an e-commerce site is just as important as the front (customer) end, and enables the merchant to add or view valuable information about the site content or performance. Products can be added or modified through an online editor or bulk you can upload a product catalogue in a familiar spreadsheet form, this is great for big updates or stock takes. Site databases can be synchronised with your stock or order system for total integration. Staff can be given different logins to back ends with differing control over their levels of authorisation.

For a demonstration of our sites merchant areas please contact us, we will be happy to provide you with a temporary login.

Getting customers to your ecommerce site is the key to your sites success, the best way to do this has to be by free organic search engine rankings, it follows therefore that your e-commerce site is built from the start to be search engine friendly. Our sites utilise proven search engine optimisation techniques, including correct densities, search engine friendly URL’s, fully index-able pages and site maps. Please see our Search Engine optimisation pages to find out more about optimisation techniques and our services.

Having the facility to serve your business or account customers via your e-commerce web site is an invaluable tool, as you well know all customers are different, so why treat them all the same. We have the technology to give your website a different appearance for each customer or customer group who visits. For example you could set up a group of customers who when logged in will see different pricing or products from a non logged in customer. If you deal with the public and the trade this feature is invaluable. Customers can also log in to see their order progress, saved shopping baskets, create wish lists and sign up for news letters.

Coupons are unique codes that are generated by the merchant or store owner that correspond to a percentage or fixed amount of discount, and are entered during the checkout process. This facility is fantastic for running promotions and tracking R.O.I of your marketing campaigns. Coupons are generated either for single or multi-use with specified start and end dates and are auto-generated from the website backend.

Our websites generally include a quantity break feature for individual products, additionally individual product promotions are possible for example ‘buy one get one free’ type offers.

An ideal way of boosting sales is buy recommending products or accessories as a bolt on impulse sale or by up-selling customers by recommending upgrades, this can be easily achieved with our sites, and can if wished be linked to past sales data.

Products are not always physical objects that require shipping; you may want to sell software, plans, e-books, or audio files. Fisheye offer this facility to within our sites, end users can click to purchase a virtual product or download, go through to a payment gateway for processing then be returned to a download page on successful processing of their payment.

A great way to get your customers involved in your site is to offer the facility for them to say something about the products. Customers would rather have recommendations from other customers than from the store owner. Your customers are able to place a review on a product, and the merchant decides if anyone can place a review or only customers that bought that product. Reviews can be moderated by the merchant who decides what goes live.

It is important to be able to monitor in real time statistics about your web sites performance, so you can make the necessary changes to different areas of your site to make improvement in it’s performance. Website statistics for page loads, basket conversion rates, visitors, visitor paths and visit lengths can be logged.