E-commerce, in a nut shell, is the online presentation of products or services. Essentially e-commerce is marketing.
It is not simply selling on line!
At Amphitheatre, we produce web sites that enable organisations to reach out throught the world wide web and market as effectively as possible, their products and services.
Consider a recruitment company, searching for candidates to fill roles for their clients. Their products are the roles they are trying to fill. They need to adopt the best marketing strategy to attract the best candidates ahead of their competitors who may also be marketing the same roles.
If we understand E-commerce as marketing, we should understand what else we need to achieve from it.
Displaying products and services, and attracting visitors to our site is one thing. If the visitor does not buy anything or make a decision in our favour our marketing is letting us down. E-commerce then is also the art of pursuading the customer that your site is the one to do business with, without the need to search for another 20 similar sites to make comparisons with before making that decision.
Here at Amphitheatre that is our philospophy and that is what we offer as our service when we talk abour e-commerce. How this is achieved is often entirely different for each client, and we base our strategy on the unique business environment of your organisation. But, to list the elements that we would break down your e-commerce strategy into:
- Search Engine Opimisation
- Business and market environment analysis
- Competitor analysis and comparisons
- Design and build process
- Copy and data import process
- Post development usability analysis
- Statistical analysis of site performance
- On going SEO and commercial element revisions
Your Relationship With Amphitheatre Ltd
Unlike most other new media companies our relationship with our clients does not stop when the site goes live. That would be be like parents abandoning their children when they start primary school. Search engine results take over 3 months to start to show significant progress, and we will revise the SEO strategy on a monthly basis to make sure that the site is performing to our expectation. Our SEO service is also a 12 month Post Development relationship.
Anyone familiar with the software development industry will know that there are commonly certain processes adopted for defining the scope and functionality of a project before development commences. Any change requests to the design from this point are generally denied. A charge for bug fixing is also levvied if a bug is noticed after the client has accepted delivery of the site. We at Amphitheatre Ltd do not agree with this approach: It stultifies creativity and flexibility. The design phase of our projects continue right up until sites go live (This may have an impact on the go live date or the price of the project if the changes are substantial, but all minor requests will be incorporated within the inital pricing stricture.). And if after this time any bugs are found we fix them without charge. There will often be additional work that is requested, after launch which we will be pleased to undertake.
One further point to make here is that we adopt an exclusive 20/80 rule. What that means is that if we produced an e-commerce strategy for a surf wear organisation, we would not work with any competitor of that organisation for 5 years. But where we are additionally approached to produce an e-commerce strategy for instance for a sailing clothing organisation, where both organisations might sell the same ranges of sunglasses, only so long as the product ranges are not more than 20% identical would we enter into any agreement.
We offer a range of supplementary services, such as web hosting, domain name hosting, smtp server hosting (email); infact everything that would enable an e-commerce site to function correctly.