E-commerce, from catalogue to checkout.

An online store is a catalogue, a set of product pages and a checkout. It has to load on a phone, be found in search and tell the buyer the truth about price and stock.

What the work includes

Catalogue structure: Categories and products arranged so that every product can be reached by following links, by a shopper and by a search engine.
Product pages: A page and an address of its own for each product, with its name, price, availability and description in the page as text.
Filters and sorting: Ways to narrow a list that help the shopper without handing a search engine an endless supply of near-identical addresses.
Speed on phones: Images sized for the screen they appear on and scripts kept to what the shop needs, measured on a phone and not only on a desk.
Checkout: As few steps as the order allows, the full cost shown before the last one, and errors explained where they happen.
Product data: Structured data for price and availability that says exactly what the page says, and changes when the page does.
Platform questions: What the shop needs from its software, settled before any software is chosen.

Why a store is harder than a site

A store is a site with more ways to go wrong. Its product pages are all made from one template, so one mistake is repeated on every product. Every combination of filters can become an address of its own, and a search engine may spend its time on those instead of on your products. Photographs are heavy. And at the end there is a checkout, where a buyer who is unsure what happens next can simply leave.

None of this shows in a screenshot of the home page.

What we build

The catalogue. Menus link to categories, categories to sub-categories, and those to every product. That is how Google asks a store to be arranged. Its crawlers, the programs that read your pages, follow links; they do not press a “load more” button. A product that can only be reached by typing into the shop’s search box is easy for a search engine to miss.

The product page. Each product has an address of its own. Its name, its price and whether it is in stock are in the page as text. The same facts are stated once more as structured data: a short block of code that tells a machine what the page is. We mark up only what the page shows, and the page shows only what is true: the real price, the real stock, reviews that customers wrote.

The phone. We design the store for a phone first and check it on a desk afterwards. Our working assumption is that most of your buyers are holding one. Images are sized for that screen, and scripts are kept to what the shop needs. Google reads the phone version too: it indexes and ranks a site from its mobile pages.

The checkout. The full cost before the last step. No account demanded without a reason. If your customers prefer to order through WhatsApp, that conversation is part of the checkout and gets the same care.

Questions to settle first

The platform, the software the shop runs on, is chosen last. These questions choose it:

How many products are there, and how often do they change?
Who updates prices and stock, and how much time do they have?
How do your customers pay, and how does the order reach them?
Where does an order go after it is placed: stock, accounts, a person?
What already works in the shop you have now?

What to do next

Write down your answers, even roughly, and send them to us. If the shop already exists, read website redesign first: a store has more addresses to carry across than most sites. The speed measures we use are explained under technical SEO.

What we will not promise

A sales figure. A store can be easy to find and easy to use. What people buy depends on the product, the price and the service behind it.
Prices or stock shown in search results. Structured data makes that possible. Google decides, and says it does not guarantee it.
Urgency we made up. No countdown that restarts, and no “only two left” unless there are two left.
One platform that is right for every shop. It depends on what you sell and who will run it.