We’ve watched a number of our friends, and our favourite local shops and restaurants struggling over the last few weeks. They’re sitting on stock, they’re not sure when they can reopen or return to normal trading, and they’re not able to get their products into the hands of their loyal customers.
We noticed that a lot of these shops were heavily (or wholly) dependent on their retail experience and often had limited-to-no e-commerce experience. We decided we wanted to help.
Our team of product specialists got to work thinking about how we could leverage our experience building websites and apps for large businesses and retail chains — and came up with a way to make sure we could deliver reliable, secure, robust e-commerce experiences quickly and on a budget.
Today we’re proud to launch our new “E-Commerce in a box” solution — by focussing on the most important factors to independent businesses during the pandemic. Our goal is to:
- Make it easy — independent retailers need to be able to get started with an e-commerce offering with little or no technical expertise
- Make it fast — we can help you go from having zero presence to fulfilling your first orders in as little as two weeks
- Make it affordable — it’s a difficult time to invest and we want to be sure we can help businesses balance this investment to bring in a new revenue stream to keep their business going
- Make it better than a standard “web builder” experience — by focussing on security, reliability and ability to scale if e-commerce becomes an ongoing part of your business following the pandemic
Background
When we dug a little deeper into the situation we were surprised to learn that 40% of British businesses still have no online presence. Coupled with the fact that European online retail sales throughout April increased by 22% with people spending, on average, 10–30% more online than they otherwise would, a brands ability to sell online is set to become increasingly integral to their survival. Customer’s online behaviours have quickly changed and adapted to a life spent indoors, and now more than ever it‘s imperative that businesses with minimal online presence pivot and quickly establish robust e-commerce capabilities that allow them to sell their products at speed.
That’s why we’re launching a new e-commerce product offering to help Britains’ independent retailers launch — or step up — their digital presence so they can get back to bringing joy to the country. Our e-commerce offering is designed to bring our 10 years worth of experience in building digital products to bear for everyone. We want to help businesses navigate through these testing times and are delighted to open up our wonderful team of digital product experts to independent retailers and beyond.
Our e-commerce offering enables us to leverage our expertise in building User Experience-focussed products to quickly develop websites with:
- Optimised e-commerce flows
- Best practice UX & UI across mobile & desktop
- Ability to quickly funnel customers through guided and intuitive journeys
- Allow users to easily convert and become consistent brand advocates
These digital storefronts act as a businesses virtual real estate that are open to customers 24/7. This allows loyal patrons to support their local business whilst also opening up the opportunity to connect with new customers. We’ll focus on all the heavy lifting like design, development, QA, and product population, to allow businesses to focus on what matters most to them. Our goal is to help businesses to develop a safe, secure, reliable online shopping experience that’s ready to scale as they grow as best they can through this crisis.
And if online delivery doesn’t work for your business, don’t worry. We’ve seen a sharp rise in retailers establishing an e-commerce presence as a means of tracking orders through a click-and-collect service with online payments, negating the need for dreaded contactless payment conducted from the safety of six feet.
In creating this new service we’ve focused on two elements that we know are vitally important to independent retail owners. Speed to market and affordability. Our e-commerce package achieves both.
We know that nothing can replace the physicality of local retailers but we know that we can help customers and businesses alike by unlocking the potential to purchase those goods online.
If you are interested in knowing more about how our e-commerce support could help you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch to get started. You can contact us directly at ecommerce@hyd.agency.
