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E-commerce platforms have become a necessity for any retailer. In today’s world, customers prefer to buy online. The issue is that most brick and mortar stores do not have an e-commerce solution yet.

Are you one of them?

If yes, we can undoubtedly help you out. Over the years, we at Web321 have helped countless businesses to create an e-commerce store of their own using WordPress. WordPress being the popular content management system in the world, is, of course, the platform of choice. You might be thinking, but WordPress is a blogging platform. That is not true!

With the help of woocommerce, a WordPress platform, we have created hundreds of e-commerce stores for our clients. When you look at the e-commerce market, woocommerce has a share of 27%. That’s how popular it is.

The open-source architecture of woocommerce is what makes it very popular. It consists of various free and premium themes, which indeed allows you to customize the e-commerce platform. There are plug-ins for every aspect of e-commerce like marketing, accounting, shipping, payments, etc.

Before we help you understand how we can digitize your brick and mortar store, let us look at some of the functionalities of woocommerce.

What is Woocommerce?

Woocommerce was the brainchild of Mike Jolley and James Kosters. These 2 were programmers hired by Woothemes in 2011. They created woocommerce in that very year. Since WordPress was already popular, woocommerce became popular quickly.

So much so that by 2014, it had a market share of 17.7% in the e-commerce industry. By May 2015, WooThemes (Parent company of WooCommerce) and WooCommerce were acquired. The acquirer was none other than Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com. According to some estimates, the transactions which the woocommerce platform handles today are over $ 10 billion.

Now that you are familiar with woocommerce let us look at some of the functionalities and features of woocommerce.

What does Woocommerce have on offer?

Woocommerce has a lot to offer. Some of the features that help it stand out are:

• It is easy to customize the woocommerce platform using various themes available.
• Woocommerce allows you to manage customer accounts and even guest checkouts.
• Woocommerce helps you in optimizing your store for search engine rankings.
• Woocommerce provides you with detailed analytics using various plug-ins.
• Woocommerce helps you in tracking the orders and fulfilling them.
• The platform even offers you a built-in blog for your e-commerce site.
• Through various plug-ins, you can add features like product ratings, reviews, tags, and attributes to your e-commerce store.
• Woocommerce regularly updates the platform and plug-ins to ensure that your store is completely secure.
• The number of plug-ins available for the woocommerce platform is increasing, is it an exponential rate. The customization options are also increasing with the increasing number of plug-ins.
• Woocommerce also allows you to upsell and cross-sell your products to generate more revenue.
• Another great advantage of woocommerce is that if you want to create your plug-in or imbibe your feature, you can custom code that.
• And much more

In a nutshell, woocommerce has everything to offer, which an e-commerce store might ask for. Through hundreds of plug-ins available, you can imbibe these functionalities in your store.

However, the problem is that even with this open-source platform, you will have to boring hours of research to set up an e-commerce store. You will have to gain technical knowledge to modify the templates and other plug-ins to suit your needs. What if we have a readymade solution for you?

Before we go into that solution, let us understand why retailers need to have an e-commerce store in the first place.

Why is it a necessity for retailers to have an e-commerce store?

Over the past decade, the preference of customers to shop online has been pretty clear. In the year 2020, this became more of a necessity rather than a luxury. Some of the reasons why you need to have an e-commerce store are:

• Tap into the growing market of consumers shopping online
• Reach out to Millennials
• Diversify your customer acquisition process
• Boost your ROI through online marketing and sales
• Scale up your business

With the need for an e-commerce store being pretty clear, Let us now highlight how Web321 can help you.

How can we help you step into the world of e-commerce?

Web321 hass a flexible e-commerce solution that can help you in digitizing your partial or an entire inventory. You can cherry-pick the items which you want to sell online and which you want to sell on your brick and mortar store. The choice is completely yours. Also, we also take care of every aspect of your e-commerce store.

For example, we provide you with payment gateway solutions. At the start, we can provide you with payment gateway solutions that charge a normal transaction fee. When your volumes increase, we can help you switch over to payment gateways, charging lower transaction fees. This is just a single way in which we can help you out.

With complete digitization solutions, we can help you step into the world of e-commerce without lifting a finger.

Launch Online and BC Merchants

In February, The BC Government launched a grant program to help businesses retool and get online. We’re ready to help businesses get online: Launch Online. We can build and manage your online store. Best of all: the government may pick up 75% of the costs associated.

What Is BOPIS?

Some of the features of our service, which help it stand out include:

BOPIS stands for Buy Online. Pickup in Store. Many customers prefer to opt for this mode while buying through an e-commerce platform owned by a brick and mortar store. It lets them have a physical connection with the retailer as well. It also makes them more comfortable with shopping online. Moreover, customers need not worry about delayed deliveries, stolen shipments, and so on.

The hybrid model is certainly gaining more and more traction. According to GlobalData Retail, this format of store pickup had a market share of 33% in 2018. In 2020, this hybrid model has gained even more traction.

One of the reasons why customers prefer it is to avoid high shipping fees.

As a business owner, this model makes it easier for you to manage your inventory. Whenever there is a BOPIS order, you can remove the item from the shelf as it has already been paid for. It will help you manage your inventory much better. It will also make you more nimble-footed.

The good news is that at Web321, we provide you with ready made BOPIS solutions. Once you opt for our service, you can receive such orders right away. It is one of the main highlights of our e-commerce solution.

• Fully Managed Websites: Our Woocommerce based ecommerce solutions are fully managed. You need not bother about installing plug-ins or custom coding features into it. With every feature like order cards, inventory management, checkout process, and order alerts are taken care of, you need to focus on your business rather than having to worry about imbibing these features in your e-commerce store.
• One Low Monthly Fee: Web321 does not require you to pay extra for anything. We have low monthly fee plans, which include the features which you need. (More on the plans below). You need not pay extra for every feature which you require. We do not provide you with piecemeal solutions. We believe in providing a holistic solution.
• Avoid expensive upfront costs: If you approach a web designing company to create an e-commerce store, they will charge you thousands of dollars and an average brick and mortar store cannot afford to shell out such a high amount in a single go. We provide you with low, upfront monthly fee plans, which is much more affordable. Our years of experience ensure that you can digitize your store in no time without having to burn a hole in your pocket.
• Payment Gateway Integration: We offer various payment gateways, which means that accepting payment online is not going to be an issue for your store. You will not have to approach every payment gateway yourself. We provide you with a ready made solution.
• Customized E-commerce solutions: Additionally, we also offer you customized e-commerce solutions if you’re looking for the same. We believe in providing our customers with complete freedom when it comes to setting up their e-commerce store.

With these features, you can be sure to have your e-commerce store up and running in no time with Web321.

On the other hand, when you try to set up your e-commerce store yourself using WordPress and woocommerce, you will have to deal with a lot of different lenders and expenses like:

• You will have to shell out approximately $ 30 per month for site hosting. (We work with tried and test web hosting providers.)
• You will have to register the domain for anywhere from $ 10-$ 30 per year. (Web321 uses a trusted domain registrar like Namecheap)
• You will have to opt for a premium theme with the untested vendor to set up your e-commerce store. (We use themes built on Divi Foundation. We also offer our clients premium themes ranging from $80 to $ 100 per year)
• For each additional plug-in which you need, you will have to pay extra. (Apart from the basics, if you need anything else, we can provide such a plug-in for around $ 300/year)

• You will have to approach multiple payment gateways to get approval from at least one. It can be costly and time-consuming. (We work with trusted payment gateways)

As you can see, we provide every service you might need to set up your e-commerce store. Rather than having to deal with multiple and untrusted vendors, you can hire us so that we can provide you with time-tested solutions.

Are you wondering about our plans? Worry not!

Web321 Plans:

At Web321, we believe in offering an affordable service to our customers. You can get a fully managed and designed e-commerce store at just $321 per month. At this low fee, you need not worry about large upfront costs. The low monthly fees ensure that you can get managed e-commerce store. The advantage of the same is that you need not hire anyone to take care of the glitches or any other problems. It is a complete, managed website. You just need to focus on the business and fulfill the orders.

Need more?

If so, we have two expansion plans as well.

• “Open for Business” –  eCommerce Booster: When you buy this additional plan, we will set up the e-commerce store, shopping cart, payment gateway, and even digitize 50 SKUs (products) for you. Through this plan, you will have a ready website with listed products that you can market right away.
• “The Merchandiser” – Inventory Booster: Want to list more products on your ecommerce store? If yes, this is the perfect plan for you. It entitles you to 100 new SKUs (products) for your e-commerce website. If you are expanding into a new niche or are selling more products in your store, this plan can help you with that. It will allow you to sell the new products on your e-commerce store as well. Not only will we create the digital listings of these products but also integrate the right keywords and metadata into it. We also take care of the product images so that you can start marketing these products through your store away.

In a nutshell, you get 100 product listings for your e-commerce store right away.

At Web321, we aim to help small retailers take advantage of the e-commerce opportunity. You need not pour in hundreds of thousands of dollars to start or manage an e-commerce store. With our low upfront fee, each and every brick and mortar store can have an e-commerce store of their own. If until now, you were afraid of shelling out a huge upfront cost to set up your e-commerce store, you need not worry about the same now. With our services, you can easily sell every product online through your ecommerce store.