Iain's IT Solutions Ltd.

I've just added a shop to my site. Main reasons - to hopefully sells some things and to show potential clients I can build and implement a shop into a site.

I have successfully sold some things on eBay. It's good as it gives your product a large exposure. However each listing is only on there a week and the fees add up. I've also listed some things on Gumtree but have never ever sold anything. I've given a couple things away for free - but have never made money from Gumtree.

So the idea for the shop on my site is to list some of my second hand gear - and if I can think of anything else - new things as well. The listings don't cost me anything and can stay on there as long as necessary. I'll be constantly refining the pages to make them rank as well as they can in search engines so they can be found - the low exposure of course being the main drawback - but they're better listed long term on here at no expense rather than for a short time on eBay for a fee - especially if I've had them on eBay and they've not sold.

I can integrate a shop like this into your site.

The layout is basic and clean with categories and products under each category. You can browse products under each category or keyword search across all products. Multiple photos can be uploaded for each product (at no cost, unlike eBay). Products can be purchased online using PayPal. There's a shopping basket where multiple products can be added and multiples of each product can be specified - up to the number in stock (given by you in the content management system). Postage can be specified at product or basket level and can be customised to whatever your rules are.

Payments are handled on the PayPal site - so your site does not need to be secure. If the customer has a PayPal account they can sign in and pay with just one click - so they don't have to enter their card details, name, address etc into yet another site - one of the benefits of using PayPal. If they don't have a PayPal account they can make the payment using their card on the trusted PayPal site.

I've tried to keep the CSS styling of the shop sections as separate as possible so the layout can be lifted and dropped into your site - am sure though some CSS tweaking will be required to integrate the shop nicely.

There's content management pages where you can log in and add, view, modify and delete categories, products and photos all by yourself.

I can also integrate PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) so the feedback of the confirmed payment can be fed automatically into your database. This IPN automatically reduces the quantity in stock of each purchased item.

If you're interested in generating some revenue from a shop on your website - get in touch.