Web Shops/ecommerce

Surf Interactive have worked with e-commerce systems since the first commercial transactions began to take place on the Internet. Fortunately, since those early stages the costs of achieving and running an online shop have vastly reduced, opening up this potential market to small and medium operators. Nowadays, it is quite possible and reasonably frequent for 1 man bands and small cottage industries to be fully web and e-commerce enabled.

Again, as with any web project we start with the brief. There are many elements to investigate with a web shop and quite often, 3^rd party companies such as automated credit card transaction companies (payment providers) need to be involved. Security is paramount with any web-shop – particularly when live payments are being transacted and so particular attention has to be paid to attaining a good and solid project brief. We will then work with you to hone this brief and bring it to fruition.

Work flow is of particular importance with e-commerce and web shops. The addition of content is a labourous task, probably the most labourous of all, particularly with large shops with thousands of products, so an efficient flow and distribution of work has to be attained if the project is to meet deadlines. Whether we manage your project in it's entirety, or work with your staff to manage the population of content, you can be sure that we will guide you through the whole process.

Once your e-commerce site or web-store hits the testing phase, you will receive appropriate tuition and supportive documents to help you learn the system. All of the systems that we use are considered not only for the technical benefits, but also usability and often there are plug ins available for these e-commerce systems in order to make certain tasks easier, such as exporting data to sage, producing VAT invoices, specific or region specific shipping and delivery requirements, integration with google's froogle, gift certificates, email promotions, wholesaling options, wish lists, advanced reporting options and search engine optimisation.