Hosting and e-commerce

If you sell a product then chances are you have a website, and if you have a website there is a good chance that you already have a transactional website or sell your products online. E-commerce sites enable customers to browse products in the comfort of their own home and also without the hassles or pressures of a City Centre or a keen salesperson. This coupled with the rising cost of business rates, taxation and the lack of funding for small businesses in the UK means that without the high costs of a shop/staff companies can sell their products online for a competitive price to a worldwide audience and still retain good margins.

Much like bricks and mortar shops these websites go through a re-design or a revamp every few years to keep themselves competitive, current and also to try and keep customers on their websites for longer periods of time. Since it is proven that the more time people spend on your site the more likely they are to buy something. At the time of these revamps many people take that opportunity to examine their current hosting arrangements and how they can get reliability, performance and maximum uptime for a competitive price.

Howies™ is a great example of a company that is almost 100% internet based in terms of sales and has been a customer of ours through three of these such revamps. As keen Internet shopper myself their site is an excellent example of being functional, nice to look at, simple and fast to load. Howies™ have been a customer of ours for around four years now and they realised during that time that there is no point spending lots of time and money on having a great website if the hosting platform is not both scalable and reliable.

Ruben Lightfoot E-Commerce Manager at Howies™ said:

"As a brand with a strong environmental conscience, Howies are always interested in finding new ways of reducing the impact of what we do. Memset have always seemed to share this interest, and their Green IT measures are one of the reasons we choose them to host our current website. Add to that a near-100% uptime and you have a great web host."

Another large site that has been hosted with us for years is Subside Sports and is relatively unique in offering around 4000 official Football shirts 100% online to a worldwide audience. The site is simple and clear and offers a great user experience in terms of clear pictures and ease of navigation. Over the years as their requirements have changed and grown we have provided them with solutions to cope with this and this includes in it's the latest guise of load balancing, failover and full system backups in the case of disaster recovery.

The final site that I would like you to look at which we host is www.safeloans.co.uk and although they are selling short-term loans the site is simple, clear, fast to load and also contains all the information a customer will need to know in order to make a fast and informed decision. This is a more recent customer of ours and the owner of the company moved to us as part of a site redesign that happened recently.

I guess the point of this short article is not to sing the praises of Memset as a hosting company (although we do pretty well in that regard) but rather to remind people if they are looking at starting an ecommerce site or even re-designing one is to try and ask yourself the following questions;

• Does it look nice?
• Are my products easy to find
• Are the pictures of a high quality?
• Is the site fast to load?