Ecommerce Website Design

1. How many products do you want added to your website?
   (100 products will take much longer to setup than 10 products)
   –  How many variations of each product? i.e. various Sizes , Colors, etc. etc.
   – Do you have professional images of your products?
   – Do you have all the details: product titles, descriptions, pricing, etc. etc.
   – Do you want us to manually upload each product for you OR do you have it ready in a CSV file for quick upload?
2. Number of pages you want on the website?
   – Basics would be the Home page, About page, Shop page, Contact page
   – What other pages do you want?
   – What content do you want to display on the pages? Do you have the content or shall we supply it?

The best thing you can do is get a quote here.

We don’t offer hosting. One company we recommend to all our clients is HostAfrica.

• Based in Cape Town
• Rated #1 ISP on Hello Peter
• Amazing customer support

Here’s a step-by-step video showing you how to easily setup hosting with them.

2022 Pricing is as follows from HostAfrica:

1. Hosting = R110/m (1 month free if you pay for 1 year upfront)
2. Domain = Free for first year. Then R89/YEAR (for a .co.za)

Warning: You can definitely find cheaper hosting but it’s not worth the headaches.

Website maintenance is optional and highly recommended – especially for an ecommerce website because you are dealing with transactions which makes security even more important.

Why?

The backend plugins (which make up your site’s design and functionality) are constantly being updated by the developers of those plugins. We need to manually update those plugins on the website. An outdated plugin may cause problems. If you choose not to maintain your site then it becomes vulnerable to malware, virus attacks, design issues, etc.

What’s included?

• Maintenance is 1 hour per month and completed once per month.
• Backup of your website (done before any updates are performed)
• Updates of all your backend plugins, themes, etc.
• Troubleshoot any issues/conflicts that may arise from the updating
• Backup after updates are completed (so we have the latest copy of the site)

More details: Website Maintenance Package

Other costs to consider – separate from the costs mentioned above (Hosting, Domain, Web Design & Maintenance):

1. SEO – helps your website get found higher on search engines
2. Logo Design or any other custom graphics (icons, images, etc.)
3. PPC like Google Ads or Facebook Ads
4. Social Media Marketing
5. Autoresponder setup & management (email list)
6. Other marketing services to build brand exposure and get more leads and sales.

No we don’t – for a very good reason. Every single client has different needs & wants. This is only realized during the discover phase of the process. We have a series of questions to ask you before giving a quotation. Also, our process ensures we have a 100% success rate with our clients being completely satisfied with their website – because we deeply understand what they need and want.

Word of advice: I’ve had many clients come to me after a bad experience with a web designer that just ‘threw’ a price at them quickly without discussing their needs fully. This is a sign of desperation & lack of experience and often leads to results you don’t want – frustration with a waste of time & money.

Let’s do this right the first time around.

The best solution would be to build it yourself. You can use this free tutorial I made on YouTube. It’s very basic but a good place to start. Just make sure to set the right expectations for yourself. Building a website with no real experience will most likely get very poor results because there’s a lot more that goes into building a successful online store. If you choose to go this route then I’d suggest continuous learning and working on your website regularly over months to tweak and improve it. Good luck.

We use WordPress and woocommerce to build online stores – for 3 main reasons:

1. WordPress is the most widely used CMS (website platform) in the world
2. Allows you to keep your monthly costs more affordable compared to Shopify.
3. Easy for you to manage inventory using the free woocommerce app – we help you set this up.

If you want a 100% DIY solution then Shopify is perfect for you i.e. you do everything yourself from design to maintenance.

Just be mindful that it takes way more than a pretty store to convert visitors into buying customers.

Why don’t we offer Shopify website design & setup?

Truth is we could easily offer this service and make decent money BUT the major issue we have with Shopify is that YOU, the client, will be locked into the Shopify platform leaving you extremely limited.

What do we mean?

You’d be using Shopify’s platform. So if they decide to change a policy that affects your business or up their pricing radically there’s literally nothing you can do about it. And, if you want to move away from the platform you need to build a brand new website from scratch – costing you more downtime, money and headaches.

Our mission is to give small – medium sized businesses the best digital solutions long term. WordPress aligns with this mission.

Why is WordPress better for your business?

WordPress is open source. This means that you are not tied into any one hosting platform. You have total flexibility. If, for whatever reason, you want to move hosting companies you can. Best of all it’s free to move and they do it for you in under 24 hours – with zero downtime.

We’ve built online stores for all types of product based businesses such as… 

1. Physical shops needing an online store to expand their reach in South Africa.
2. Entrepreneurs who manufacture their own products in SA and need an online store to sell their products.
3. Entrepreneurs who import unique products into SA and need an online store to sell these products

Two types of ecommerce websites we don’t build

• We don’t build marketplace-type websites such as Amazon, Takealot, Ebay, Autotrader, etc.
• We don’t build dropshipping websites

Our passion will always be to help small – medium sized companies dominate on Google.

Easy peasy…

You have two main options:

Option 1: We add a courier company’s software into your website (most accurate).

This software will automatically calculate the courier fee on checkout based on the customers delivery address.

NB: We recommend Fastway Couriers because their software is the only one in SA that integrates well with WordPress at this point in time i.e. the other options mess up the website’s design or functionality.

Steps to get it setup:

1. You setup an account with Fastway
2. Send us the welcome email they send you
3. We connnect the Fastway software to your website
4. You discuss all nitty gritty detals with Fastway (package sizes etc)

Option 2: We manually add the areas and cost for each area (least accurate)

Woocommerce only allows us to select provinces – not specific cities and towns in SA.

We can select areas by postcodes but that would be entirely seperate project on it’s own because there are 1000’s of postcodes (this project would be seperate and not included in the price)

So this is what we can do for you…

• We allocate 4 main delivery areas
  – Local pickup (if you have location for collections)
  – Local delivery (province)
  – Other large provinces
  – Other areas (not covered above)
• You give us a price to alocate to the 3 areas above (local pickup would be no cost)

We recommend going with option 1 because it’s more accurate and less work for everyone involved.

Yes you can. We build websites using WordPress and offer basic video training if needed. This gives you the option to login and make minor adjustments by yourself (if you want to do this). E.g. Adding/deleting images in your Gallery or being in full control of your Blog posts.

Of course! We here for the long term. Pricing can be discussed when we get to the quote stage.

Building a website is one service. Having that website show high in Google is an entirely seperate service called Search Engine Optimization. Read more about SEO here. 

Send me (Zaid) your questions and I’ll get back to you with an answer: info@aligndesigns.co.za