You really have no limits with respect to what payment processors you have on your website, as it relates to its design and development. Where there may be limits is with regards to the location of your business, where your customers are (local, national or worldwide), the types of payments you wish to take and the parameters that your bank operates with.

You could set up payment processing that means you can take direct credit and debit card payments on your website, or you might consider PayPal, which is one of the most popular online payment processing systems in the world. Whichever you decide, any, and all of them, should be able to be incorporated into your website design.

We have to start by saying that even the best website designs in the world, can’t salvage a business if the product or services it is trying to sell are substandard or there’s no demand for them to begin with. However, for a business whose products already have an active market and are of sufficient quality, good website design can make a significant difference to its sales.

Apart from those benefits, we have mentioned in answer to other questions, such as better branding and SEO, a well-designed website can be the online showroom for your products.

Optimised product page layouts which have high-quality images and enticing product descriptions can help boost sales of your products, and if the entire website makes it easy for visitors to navigate, search for products and, most importantly, make purchasing them a hassle-free process, then the results can only be positive for sales performance.

We do offer a number of marketing services to our clients, including those who have eCommerce businesses. Obviously, if we were the ones designing and building your eCommerce website then it would make the task of marketing it easier, as we could ensure everything was optimised from the start.

Nevertheless, if you have an existing eCommerce website, we can advise you how it could be optimised in respect of its ranking on the search engines. This would include providing you with a free SEO analysis upon which we would base our recommendations. Our SEO service includes keyword research, SEO for local businesses, Google maps listings, obtaining reviews and how to protect yourself from fake reviews also.

Should you wish to accelerate your marketing using paid advertising then we have experts on hand to help you with that too. We can optimise paid campaigns on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, and Instagram including keyword research, bidding levels for clicks and split testing.

Beyond these, we also provide tracking and analysis of your campaign ensuring that your ads are effective and that you are getting the best returns for your advertising budget.

Any eCommerce business that takes itself seriously and wants to progress must have visitor and sales tracking as part of its website’s infrastructure. The one which does it best, in our opinion, is Google Analytics, with one of its main benefits being it can integrate with other platforms such as Facebook.

We won’t get into the intricacies of how you set up all the specific tracking Google Analytics offers you, as this requires a number of steps, some more involved than others. However, once it has been set up, the advantages you will have over your competition, who do not track their sales conversion, will be huge.

Some simple ones will be being able to see the locations of those who buy from you which could allow you to increase your targeted marketing campaigns to those towns, cities or even countries, depending on where you sell to. This also means any budget you are allocating in relation to that market is better spent.

You will also be able to see which content within your website is having the biggest impact on your sales as visitors move from that content to purchasing. This shows that should you drive more traffic to that content, and also that you should create more of that type.

Traffic from external sources can also be tracked, including paid advertising. Again, this allows you to increase the flow of traffic from the ones that are producing conversions by possibly increasing ad spend there, while reducing it for those that are proving less successful.

The idea that customer service only ever involves large teams of people answering a bank of telephones needs to be put to bed immediately. Thanks to the internet, customer service, including for eCommerce websites, can be achieved better and more efficiently than that, and for a much lower cost too.

Your customer service can involve a number of elements that each provide the appropriate level of service required. One of the simplest is to include a comprehensive FAQ page, where you try to answer as many of the most common, and most asked questions that your customers may have.

Social media is also a great way to communicate and help customers so you might want to consider setting up a Facebook page. Even better than that is a Facebook group where customers can have their queries answered, not just by you and your staff, but by other customers too.

Many businesses utilise customer service ticket software within their website where customers can write details of their problems and submit them. The key to this being effective is having the resources in place so that these tickets can be responded to and answered as quickly as possible, and ideally within minutes, rather than hours.

Even better than the ticket system is having live chat on your website, whereby you have a team that can respond instantly and help customers there and then. A chat system can be incorporated into most website designs and is particularly desirable if you have customers in multiple cities or countries where telephoning would be impractical or expensive.