UKL E-commerce FAQs
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2. What is the difference between Web Links and Tradingeye?
3. Why should we use Tradingeye?
4. What if I already have a website?
6. Are there any other charges?
7. How long will it take to set up?
8. How easy will it be and what guarantees do I have that things will work?
9. Do you have any UKL customer sites that we can take a look at?
10. How much money can I make?
11. What about if I have other services or products?
12. What is SEO and why is this important?
13. How do the support credits work and what are the costs after the 50 credits are used up?
14. Do you offer the site but not hosted?
15. Does each item have to be priced individually or can you set a mark up to apply to all?
17. Are the weights of items from UKL all preloaded?
1. What is Tradingeye?
Tradingeye is a fully customisable site builder and e-commerce store. You completely control what is written and where and can have unlimited products and pages. You log in to the password protected online admin, are able to edit all the features, add as many menus, pages, text and products as you want and most importantly, start selling your products to millions of online shoppers, without the overheads of another retail premises. You can add as many of your own products and ranges as you want. You have unlimited products departments, pages and articles and can edit everything yourself from an online admin. It's the most Search Engine Optimisation friendly solution on the market and takes payments online safely & securely. There are hundreds of promotional, postage and marketing options, and you can get professional design, branding and customisations to suit your business perfectly - Plus lots more..
2. What is the difference between Web Links and Tradingeye?
Web Links provided by UKL at £99 per year is an online catalogue. It does the job in terms of referring a customer to it so they can browse. However, it's very basic in terms of design, you can't add your own pages, products and services and most importantly customers can't buy anything. Today's online customer wants things quickly and painlessly. If a customer really wants your product then they might well call and have a chat. But the general public will search for local shops and any barriers to purchase will often mean they go elsewhere. With Tradingeye you can manage all your orders and range of products from any internet connection. You can email people that have bought in the past. You can have promotions and sales. Everything you do in house for your business you can now manage from one place, and collect payment seamlessly. Add to that drop shipping by UKL and you're getting a state of the art online presence, minimal hassle and for a fantastic price.
3. Why should we use Tradingeye?
We're in partnership with UKL and provide Tradingeye fully loaded with the UKL catalogue along with lots of extra options suited to your type of business (such as drop shipping and broad margins applied to all their products). You can also add all your own products if you wish. Once set up, you can start selling immediately and not have to worry about stock or delivery. UKL can process the order for you and you just collect the payment. You could purchase the software from us anyway, but you'd then have to spend weeks adding products and options. The other benefit is that it was specifically built with search engine optimisation (SEO) and design in mind. The whole store can be fully designed to look completely different and specifically tailored to your business, and every page can be fully optimised to get good listings with search engines.
4. What if I already have a website?
Tradingeye is an e-commerce store, and site builder. So for someone who hasn't got a site then the advantages are clear. We've had plenty of great feed back on the demo and many customers having spent thousands on a basic site, wished they had heard of us before. But this doesn't have to stop you. If you're not already too far down the process, you're probably best off starting again or moving over the content. The back end admin has far more options and is far more flexible than other software. If however this is not suitable then you can simply have a link on your site called 'Shop' or something similar, which sends you over to Tradingeye.
5. How much does it cost?
The license is just £299 - It has all the features you need, but it will look like the demo store. Our small business package for £1,200 includes the license and a basic design (in keeping with your company image and logo) something like: www.cartrackingdevices.net. You can get a fully bespoke design service including branding, logo and a top of the range image for around £4,000, something like: www.soupstudios.com or www.canterburynewcastle.co.uk or www.gearforgirls.co.uk. Anything else like extra options or a specific service or customisation to the store will be quoted for separately, but Tradingeye has so many useful features this is rarely necessary.
6. Are there any other charges?
Hosting at £14.99 a month: This is purchased along with your package. The site needs to be hosted somewhere. Essentially this is a computer that sends people pages of your site when they type in the address. We offer fully supported hosting. This means the hardware is backed up in different locations, has virus scans and firewalls, 100% uptime, 24/7/365 monitoring, matches the server requirements for our software and a whole lot more. The important thing here is that you can call anytime if things go wrong, so zero hassle.
SSL at £52 per year: This is optional, and purchased separately from your package. This is a security certificate that is required by banks and payment gateways. We don't provide these; we just buy them from large approved companies and set them up for you. You don't have to get one (some retailers might not have credit card facilities), but if you want to take payments on your site, most banks will require that you do. www.tradingeye.com/ssl-certificates.php
Domain Names: This is optional, and purchased separately from your package. Everyone needs to have a domain name, but you may already have one so is an optional service. It's essentially your online address so www.yourdomain.com. The prices vary but generally from £9.95 per year for a .co.uk: www.tradingeye.com/domain-names.php
Customisations: Anything not included with the options of the store, small edits or extras that might help your particular business we bill out at £65 per hour. This rarely happens, but the option is there if you need it, something which most e-commerce providers don't do. You can always call to get what you like done to the site.
Note: All prices are excluding VAT (EU only)
7. How long will it take to set up?
The license and shop is set up within 24 hours (working days), but it can be as little as 1 hour. So you can start to add text and build your site almost immediately. SSL certificates take up to 48 hours for the process to complete (involving email approvals from the provider and time for the application to your site). Then the design takes 2 days for the small business package, and more if you need bespoke design. The only delay is then from your bank. If you already have merchant accounts and a bank account then this takes up to a few days, but if you are just starting out it can take a couple of weeks. You can read the E-commerce Guide we wrote to get your started.
8. How easy will it be and what guarantees do I have that things will work?
We guarantee this 100%. If there ever any issues then just call us up and we will sort them immediately, but we have thousands of happy customers using our software over the last decade, so it's very stable. The software will have a learning curve before you are used to all the options, but the basic set up is very intuitive. There is a help section within the admin of your site: www.tradingeye.com/documentation.php and don't forget to call to ask anything you like.
9. Do you have any UKL customer sites that we can take a look at?
We have only just launched this software for UKL but here are some examples of customers using the basic package: thejpsshop.co.uk or redmarklimited.co.uk or clothing.remco-graffix.com. UKL chose us because of our great software, support and track record. We have a huge portfolio of work from customers all over the world.
are good recent example of a retail outlet using Tradingeye with design work, although they aren't UKL customers.
10. How much money can I make?
Really this is up to you. We have added a broad margin facility so that you can add whatever margin you want to UKL's range of products. You can the edit particular products if you think the margin could be more. You can then add your range of products too. It's then a matter of marketing. In the same way as if you hired another retail outlet in another city, it wouldn't start to make money on day 1. You need to entice people to the store and get them to buy things. A good start is contacting all your regular customers and giving them the web site address. If anything this will be a good way of managing all your sales and streamlining the payment process. Then you need to get more customers. They will find you on Google or other search engines, but you also need to advertise in the usual way. If you sell sportswear for example, contact all the local teams, schools and universities and email them a link. As you get new customers, their details are stored in the shop and you can have regular promotions and newsletters. Once you have a good customer base, you can contact them quickly and cheaply from the click of a button. You can also offer a huge range of discounts and promotions to encourage repeat usage: www.tradingeye.com/help/promotions.html, as well as increase the basket value by having a section called 'have you seen these products?' or 'products just in!'
11. What about if I have other services or products?
Tradingeye was built for flexibility. You can add as many of your own products or ranges as you want. Also, a typical UKL customer might have an embroidery service for example. We can show you how of course, but the way to do this is to have product options. Colours and Sizes are options, but these are already built for you. You can just create an option called 'Embroidery' and link it to all your Rugby shirts for example. When a customer buys a product they will be able to fill in a text box 'Please enter the name on the back of the shirt' or something similar. This extra option will appear on the order you receive along with colours, sizes, quantities, address etc... You can also vary prices depending on the option, so a large shirt can be more, and a shirt with embroidery can have a price associated to it.
12. What is SEO and why is this important?
Tradingeye is the most customizable and SEO friendly software on the market. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the term used for search engine rankings, such as being listed on Google. There are 5 main ways to improve this other than using paid advertising.
1. Your domain name. So something like www.tshirtshop.com is better than www.megadeals.com, but only if someone is looking for t-shirts.
2. Your URL or Uniform Resource Locator (world wide web address) is also extremely important. So a product on other sites may have something like www.tshirtshop.com/productid=4sdf546s5d4f which is good for the domain name, but if you can change the URL to be www.tshirtshop.com/wherecanibuyatshirtinlondon then you are hitting actual search terms.
3. Your meta title is the title of the page. So on this page for example it's 'UKL E-commerce FAQs' and is what appears in the top of your browser. It's good to name every page and product as Google 'crawls' the internet and picks up page titles and adds this to their database. If you don't name it, it doesn't exist.
4. Your meta description and meta key words, are hidden within the code of your site. They are again used by Google to reference your page.
5. The text on your pages, especially the home page. Again, Google 'crawls' through your site searching for actual text. A lot of sites have banners, images, logos, and worst of all flash software. Now they look nice and very fancy, but Google can't read pictures. Even if the picture says something which you can read, to a computer program this is meaningless form and colour.
So what does this all mean? On most good sites you have all the above set globally - as in, they are the same on every page. So you can have up to 50 meta keywords, but these are repeated throughout the site. With Tradingeye you can edit all the above for every page, every article, and most importantly every product! The whole site is built with as much text as possible. You can edit URLs to be what you like. If you don't fill in any SEO, the global settings come into play, but when you have time, you can edit every single product to capture the widest possible audience. This is vital to grow your business and to stand out from the rest.
13. How do the support credits work and what are the costs after the 50 credits are used up?
Until you're completely happy with how to use the store and it's all working perfectly, then you'll be speaking directly to us on the phone or by email. Support credits are used for any questions that you need asking out of the set up period. The support centre is a secure and easy to manage way of dealing with lots of issues. Any bugs with the software or how to questions are free of charge anyway, so if all your doing is filling it up with products and text then you'll never use them up, especially as we install it all for you. The store comes with 50 free credits, and anything after that we charge for at roughly £1 per credit: www.tradingeye.com/installation-support.php.
14. Do you offer the site but not hosted?
Technically yes we do. You are free to purchase the store at £299 directly from our www.tradingeye.com site. You can set it up yourself, design it yourself and do any coding that you like. However the deal we have with UKL is that it comes loaded with all their products. To update everyone's stores with new products, prices and images on different servers is just not possible, so to get the UKL store you have to host it with us. The other issue are server requirements: www.tradingeye.com/pdf/server_requirements_v6.pdf. A static one page site that you can't update, is easily hosted at £5 a month elsewhere. Fully customisable store builders, with e-commerce, payment gateways and SQL databases can't be. The major issue on top of that is support. We have plenty of customers that just buy the store, spend weeks trying to get their hosts to install things properly, hire other agencies to do design work, and then come running back when they realise it was well worth always having someone there to help that knows what they're doing. We have servers with Rackspace, probably the best hosts in the world: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/managed-hosting/hosting-solutions/managed-hosting/data-centre-facilities/ so you can have the peace of mind your business wont fall apart at busy periods.
15. Does each item have to be priced indivudally or can you set a mark up to apply to all?
Yes, this is one of the features we built for UKL. Go to the admin: Settings » Global Settings » Order Settings and then scroll down to the margin calculator. You can increase or decrease by whatever percent you like, and of course if you make a mistake you can go back to the original catalogue price. You can also then overwrite these increases individually within each product.
16. If we went for the £299 option, what sort of look would the home page have, with regards to our logo?
That option has no design at all, so it looks like the UKL demo store: uklonline.tradingeye.com. You can if you choose have it like the original demo store: demov6.tradingeye.com. For an hours service at £55, we can put your logo up and change the background on the original demo such as with: thejpsshop.co.uk or redmarklimited.co.uk or clothing.remco-graffix.com. Image is extremely important after the functionality. Having a nice office, a nice suit, a nice logo, a nice business card all add to your image and your sales. Your website is often the first thing people see. Something like:
look very professional and they all use Tradingeye.
17. Are the weights of items from UKL all preloaded?
Yes they are, and they appear within the products under 'Postage & Supplier'. The weight can therefore be used to determine the postage fees if you wish.