Industry
Websites for small and neighbourhood shops
Not every shop needs e-commerce. Sometimes the whole job is that the person nearby learns you exist, what you sell, and that you are open right now. That is a small site, but it is a small site that has to be done properly.
What decides whether they get in touch
- Opening hours that are true, including holidays and off-season changes
- An address with directions in one touch, because most of these searches happen in the street
- What you sell, in the words a buyer uses rather than a supplier catalogue
- A few photographs from inside, so people know what they are walking into
A small site is not a temporary site
The temptation here is a free page on some platform, left as it is. Two years later the platform changes its terms or disappears, and the address people memorised leads nowhere. So even the small site sits on its own domain and its own code.
What is usually wrong
Opening hours left over from the launch. The customer arrives on a Sunday because the site says you are open, and never checks what the site says again.
How you know it works
Measured by touches on directions and on the phone number, and by whether people turn up in the hours you published. There are no complicated reports here, only one question, are more people coming in.
Related
What to write so I can answer properly
I answer every email myself. If the first one carries the points below, the reply comes back with specifics and a price rather than with questions.
- What the business is and which country it operates in
- What you need, meaning services, a catalogue, a store or bookings
- What the goal is, meaning more enquiries, more orders or better visibility
- Whether a site exists today and what does not work about it
- When you need it live