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Guides

Taking Your Business Online: A Beginner’s Guide

By February 21st, 2024 No Comments
Selling Online, E-Commerce

Getting your business selling online: a beginner’s guide

Recent figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed that online shopping is now accounting for a record 22% of all retail sales. The COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated an already fast-growing trend towards customers buying online, so it is now more important than ever for businesses to make sure they have an online selling presence.

However, with the huge variety of apps, eCommerce providers and web hosts now available at first glance this can seem a daunting prospect. This guide aims to answer simply: what do I need to get started selling online?

Step 1: Setting up a website

Whatever your business, having a website is near essential these days. Fortunately, it has never been easier to set one up. For small businesses and sole traders, hiring a web designer can be costly – but solutions such as Squarespace are becoming increasingly popular for those wanting to build their site themselves as these offer ready designed templates and tools to create without any previous web design or coding experience and feature low monthly costs.

Step 2: Choosing an e-Commerce platform

Once your website is created, if you have not already created it on a service that has an integrated shop you will need to choose a platform to list and sell your products. Popular platforms include WooCommerce and Magento, and these offer an easy way to add product images, descriptions, run promotions and manage stock. This will be your shopfront to the world.

Step 3: Selecting a Payment Gateway

With your website and online shop now in place, what else do you need? Well, the final step is to choose a payment gateway that will handle the actual payments from your customers and transfer the funds to you. Be aware however, not all payment gateways are created equal – many popular payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe charge a high cost on your online transactions.

UTP’s eCommerce payment gateway offers some of the lowest transaction costs on the market, while integrating seamlessly with major e-Commerce platforms, to find out more click here or call us on 0330 99 99 300

The bottom line…

It is easier and cheaper to get your business online than you may think. With customers increasingly choosing to buy from the comfort of their own home, not being online means lost sales. Whether you are new to taking online payments, or have an existing website, get in touch with UTP today and see how little taking payments online could cost you.