Development

E-Commerce

Shopping is not the way it used to be. The purchase process has been revolutionised by e-commerce, making it easier than ever for small and medium businesses to set up shop and tell the world about their products.

With an optimised e-commerce process, your business can connect with more potential customers in a more streamlined way. That’s because our e-commerce process ensures that the user journey is optimised for everyone who visits your website, whether you’re selling your products internationally or to a local area.

EDGE Creative provide e-commerce development solutions that are bespoke to the way your business operates. We get to know your product, your business and your processes inside and out, with expert attention to detail and knowledge of the marketplace.

WHY IS E-COMMERCE IMPORTANT?

E-commerce is hugely important to any business looking to sell their product and ship it out to customers across a wide geographical area. By streamlining and optimising your e-commerce processes, your website can guide more customers to a purchase.

E-commerce enables you to automate a huge part of the purchasing process, freeing up time in your business to prioritise customer service. This is also more convenient for customers, allowing them to purchase from your store at any time, with a system that’s simple and easy to use.

E-commerce is also an extremely valuable marketing tool that allows you to expand your reach through paid advertising, SEO and social media. You can direct users to the specific products they are searching for, or suggest something they might be interested.

HOW DO EDGE APPROACH ECOMMERCE?

  • 01

    STEP ONE: MEETING WITH YOU

    First and foremost, we get to know your business inside and out. We’ll organise a meeting with you to discuss your vision, objectives and business identity, carving out a plan for how your ecommerce website will need to look, how it will need to work, and the general overview of your product range.
    Our creative team will take your vision and put it into practise, giving you real life and tested solutions for your goals and objectives. Whatever you want to do with your site, we’re experts in ecommerce across a huge range of sectors, so we’ll be able to guide you in the right direction without distracting from your original idea.

  • 02

    STEP TWO: MARKET RESEARCH

    We’ll then conduct in-depth market research in order to inform the plan for your e-commerce website. This is where we’ll take a look at your competitors, the types of ecommerce processes you’d like to use, and how these can be applied to a business like yours.
    Our digital and creative teams will collaborate to research and discuss different methods, platforms and processes, making sure to tailor our recommendations to your business.

  • 03

    STEP THREE: THE JOURNEY

    We’ll then assess the user journey for your ecommerce site, from the very start of the process to following up with remarketing afterwards. Care and attention is paid to each stage of the user journey, assessing multiple choices, decisions and potential setbacks. Our experience in ecommerce means that we can assess how the user journey might impact the success of your ecommerce website, and predict future outcomes.

  • 04

    STEP FOUR: FULL SPEC

    It’s around this time that we’ll get a full specification of your website over to you. You’ll get more of an idea of the site map, how users will benefit from your site, and the points at which users can convert. Here, you’ll get the opportunity to make decisions, give us feedback and discuss with us whether you’re happy with the way the site is going.

  • 05

    STEP FIVE: WIREFRAMES & PROTOTYPES

    After the basics are signed off, we’ll create the wireframes for your e-commerce website. This will give you more of an idea of how the website will look. The wireframes are low fidelity black and white layouts that outline the specific size and placement of the page elements, features, calls to action and overall navigation of the website.
    They are stripped of any real design elements, and that allows us to focus purely on ensuring the site structure is able to reach the overall objectives of the site. This stage allows us to focus on usability testing and refine the navigation to see how the site content fits together to ensure the best user journey. It will also allow us to evaluate the performance of each page against usability standards.
    Once wireframes are complete, we will create prototypes. Prototypes are interactive versions of the wireframe. This will allow you to click through and interact with the site to see how it may function in a live environment. This is a vital stage in ensuring the website will match your expectations and perform at its optimum before the full design & build starts.

  • 06

    STEP SIX: CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION

    As part of the wireframing process, we’ll also carry out conversion rate optimisation to assess how users will move through your e-commerce website. We’ll do this to understand how a user might be persuaded into converting, and ensure that every possible chance to convert is emphasised throughout the site.
    Conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process that we carry out at every stage of the website design, development, launch and post-live review. This means that we’re always looking for ways to improve your conversion rate and ensure that a user has every chance to become a customer.

  • 07

    STEP SEVEN: DESIGN

    Once the structure for the site has been defined through the creation of the sitemap and wireframes, the next step is to create your own on-brand visual style. Your company’s brand plays an important role in this part of the process, as we will want to visually convey key brand perceptual ideas within the design of your entire site from images, fonts, buttons, products, calls to action and forms.
    During the design process we shall utilise brand guidelines supplied, ensuring that your values are presented throughout the website, using clear, easy to understand on page navigation to build upon customer service, ease of use and trust.

    We’ll incorporate design that is mobile first to ensure this journey is completely optimised, using modular design helps us to ensure the website is future proofed and new pages can easily be added.

  • 08

    STEP EIGHT: DEVELOPMENT

    Once you’re happy with the design of the website, we’ll then go ahead with development of the site and e-commerce processes. This means the designs you’ve signed off will become fully functional pages, working to the specification agreed previously.
    The site will be developed in order to allow you access for easily updating and editing the content, product range and imagery on the website. The site can allow for a number of different user levels depending on their role within the business.
    We’ll allow for the use of WYSIWG editor across the website in the various content types in order to add content to pages, posts and custom content types e.g. events.
    This allows you to add formatted text (bold, italic, headings etc.) as well as images and videos. Links can also be added to text and images. The editor supports alignment and other basic formatting tools. If you want to perform more precise layout controls, the editor has a “text” input type where you can enter raw text or HTML.

  • 09

    STEP NINE: GO LIVE

    Once you’re happy with the content, the products and the website as a whole, we’ll schedule your website to go live. Let your customers know, share it to the world and prepare for your e-commerce website to open!

  • Start your project

WHAT DO WE DO NEXT?

EMAILS

Your website is now live, but how will you let your customer know? We can provide support with email design and distribution, building responsive emailers featuring products, stunning imagery and engaging copywriting to express to your audience just how great your products are.

We can also support you with an email strategy, integrating your email lists into forms on the website, implementing automated solutions that enable you to respond faster and more efficiently.

ADS

To roll out your product range and direct users to your ecommerce website, we can support you with high quality, engaging adverts built with ROI in mind, across both Google and Facebook.

Google Ads are displayed above the organic search listing results in Google and can potentially give instant results in terms of enquiries as you have prime position on the page. Search adverts are a highly targeted as they can be tailored to users based on very specific criteria.

Our understanding of PPC and our data-driven approach gives you a lean, efficient way of generating leads. We understand which PPC channels are more effective and how to accurately create campaigns for each channel.

Facebook advertising is an effective method of reaching audiences that may not have heard of or considered using your business. Facebook advertising is a great, low cost way to reach a specific audience, with flexible options including videos, photos, carousel ads and more. It also has a wide variety of targeting options, including behaviours, interests, demographics, connections, age ranges, languages and locations. This means you can target the right users, in the right place, at the right time. These adverts are served on Facebook and will also show on Instagram for the relevant audience.

REMARKETING

Once users have visited your site, we can set up adverts to appear to them again, once they are browsing across social media and other websites. Maybe the customer didn’t purchase everything in their basket, or maybe they browsed certain products but decided not to buy. In each scenario, we can retarget these customers to help them convert.

Re-marketing banners are set up to move buyers through the sales funnel and increase brand awareness. Our campaigns are managed in way that ensures maximum levels of control over the cost per click and the cost per lead. This would mean that the user would need visual images throughout Google’s display network such as the News website like the Guardian etc.