A good website has a number of costs associated with it. POS software company Tower Systems has a track record of developing POS software integrated websites, helping small business retailers to leverage wonderful omnichannel opportunities.
A business website is not an off the shelf product. It is something finely tailored to the needs of the business it represents.
- What a website includes. What a website includes depends on the requirements of the business. Many small business retailers want an online advertisement for their retail shop. That is not an e-commerce site. An e-commerce site promotes online commerce. That is the focus of the Tower Systems work. A typical e-commerce site includes the following pages and facilities:
- About. About the business, personalising what you stand for. Humanising the business. Building trust.
- Products. Products assembled by category. Photos. Descriptions. Pricing. Data creating these entries can flow from your retailer software – depending on the extent of the data you have setup including images.
- Purchasing. A shopping cart into which people can purchase and checkout. Automatically managing freight, collecting payment and providing you a back end for managing orders.
- Payment gateway. This is the back end management of payments and the depositing of payments into your bank account. We currently support Pin Payments and PayPal. You would establish your own account for one or the other – we do not want your funds passing through our accounts.
- Location. A placemat page showing where the retail business is located and its hours, if applicable.
- FAQs. A page where you pre-answer the questions shoppers are likely to ask. You would provide the text content for this. Part of the backend management facilities would enable you to change this at any time.
- Overall design. This is the visual aesthetic representation of your online business. We have choices you can make based on work we have done. That said, our goal is to create something that professionally represents your business, that you are happy with.
- Hidden code. Behind every page on the website and for each product is ‘hidden’ code used by Google and other search engines for indexing the information and enabling it to be found. Get this wrong and your products will not be easily found online.
- Administration page. This is a page only you could access where you can change information about and settings for the site.
- Website development. For a basic site with the ability for you to load product descriptions, images prices, sell items and include text about your business as well as running two email addresses through the site will cost less than what small business retailers think. The fixed-price package includes consultation, programming and design elements to provide you with a professional site, but not a complex site. It does not include us writing the content for the site. We would expect you to provide all content.
The typical basic site would cover the pages / points all listed in point 1 above – to varying levels of detail.
Note: there are websites that cost $15,000 and more. This is too expensive in our view. The price varies according to complexity.
- Domain registration. We would guide you on this. A www name will cost around $50 for two years – paid to the registration company. This is something you would register so you have absolute control over it at all times. We have seen web companies register domains for businesses and hold the to ransom when the businesses want to go elsewhere.
- Website hosting. This is usually a per month cost. A basic site with around 500 items will cost around $220.00 a month to host. Hosting means the site running on a computer in a secure server farm. This is not a Tower Systems location but rather a location created solely to host thousands of websites. The hosting fee does not offer any labour for loading products or actually managing the site.
- SEO – Google ranking activity to help the site be easily found. We do this work through bursts with each burst professionally organised and managed. A burst involves creating backlinks for the site or for specific pages on the site that guide Google to list the site in terms of its rankings. Typically, a new site would have this work done twice in the first six months. We ask you questions about your competitors. Knowing what or who to target in dong SEO work is vital. Targeting is all done based on keywords that people will use when searching for a business like yours.
We have been successful in boosting several sites to the front page of Google rankings. Type in POS software to Google and you will see us listed on the first page immediately below Xero and MYOB. This is excellent positioning for a company our size. Getting to this position takes work. Maintaining it takes even more work. This is the SEO work to which we refer here.
