Industries
Websites and marketing for retail and online shops
Do you have it, can I get it today, and can you tell me which one I want. The third is the one the marketplaces cannot answer.
A small shop cannot beat the marketplaces on price, range or delivery speed, and should stop trying. It wins on knowing something, stocking something specific, and being a place rather than a warehouse.
How customers actually find a shop
Product searches that mostly resolve to marketplaces, local searches for anything with a shopfront, and social for anything visual. The winnable traffic is the specific — a named product, a niche category, a question the marketplaces answer badly.
What they type
- [specific product] near me
- buy [niche product] online
- [product category] shop [town]
- where to buy [product] [town]
- best [product] for [use case]
Bracketed parts are wherever you are and whatever you sell. These are phrasings, not a keyword list to stuff into a page.
Four things retail and online shops get wrong online
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Manufacturer product descriptions
The same paragraph appears on four hundred other shops, so there is no reason for a search engine to prefer yours. Rewriting the descriptions for the products you care about is slow and it is the whole game.
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Competing on price with the marketplaces
A fight that cannot be won, and one that ignores the things a small shop is actually better at: knowing which of these two products suits a given job, and being answerable when it does not.
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A physical shop treated as an afterthought
Shops with premises routinely bury the address, hours and whether an item is in stock now, which is the one thing no marketplace can offer at all.
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Checkout friction
Forced account creation, a surprise delivery charge at the final step, and a slow cart. Each one loses a share of buyers who had already decided to buy.
If you change one thing
Shipping the manufacturer’s product text. It is duplicated across every competitor, so it earns you nothing — and rewriting it for even twenty products usually moves more than a redesign.
What we would work on
- Search engine optimisation Build traffic and inbound leads that keep arriving.
- Local visibility & lead generation Help nearby customers find you, trust you, and call you.
- Social media marketing Look established, stay visible, without it eating your week.
In that order, for this trade. The pricing is the same whatever sector you are in — a five-page site is $249 to build and $399 a year to keep running.
Have we done this before
Not in this trade yet. The work we have done is here, and the four problems above hold whichever trade the last client was in.
Straight answers
Questions from retail and online shops
Usually both, for different reasons. Marketplaces bring volume and take a cut and the customer relationship; your own site is lower volume, better margin, and yours. Treat marketplace sales as discovery, not as the destination.
A hosted platform, almost always. The engineering effort a custom store consumes is better spent on product photography and descriptions, which are what actually sell.
Original descriptions, real photographs, honest specifics about fit and use, and structured data for price and availability. Products with the stock description will not rank, whatever else you do.
Buying guides, yes. Not diary posts. "Which of these two do I need for X" is a real search with real intent, and it is a question your shop can answer better than a marketplace can.
Then local search is likely your best return, ahead of the online store. Being the place that has it in stock today is an advantage no marketplace can take from you.
No, and be wary of anyone who claims to specialise in 10 industries at once. What we have is a way of working that suits small businesses — fast sites, clear pricing, no contracts — and enough time spent on shop problems to know which of them are worth money. Where we have not done work in a sector, we say so rather than dressing up somebody else's case study.
With whichever of the four problems above you recognised. Most owners know the answer before they finish reading the list. If none of them landed, the fifteen-minute call is free and we will look at what you have got.
Nearby
Other trades, same questions
- Restaurants and Cafés Are you open now, and what does the food actually look like. Everything else on a restaurant site is answering a question nobody asked.
- Dental and Medical Practices Can I get seen, will it be covered, and do people like this practice. A site that answers all three above the fold converts far better than one that leads with a mission statement.