Frequently Asked Questions for Businesses that will use the site
Yes! You aren’t held to any minimum contract or anything like that
That’s totally fine with us! We just want locals to be able to browse what’s available and if it works for you, buy it online, but your customers can also click & collect or use your own payment methods or hardware that you already have.
Your own online shop means that people have to go looking for it, the idea of this site is that people will want to see what’s available locally and will be able to find it all in one place, just like walking around the town, buying from lots of shops and also stumbling across something new! It’s Amazon without the Amazon, a website that locals will use automatically to see what’s available locally.
You don’t have to list all of your products here, just a handful will do and you can link to your online shop too.
When your online shop is created, it will automatically include ‘Click-And-Collect’ as a method, you can then choose to also add ‘Local Delivery’ and also ‘Postal Delivery’ too so you can send your products to anyone in the UK.
We’re also working on some templates for how group deliveries and pickup points could work.
You’ll get an email for every new order (if the payment has gone through OK). You can also see all orders from the dashboard on this site, to check details and mark each one as complete when it’s delivered or picked up.
Our website uses Stripe for payments, if you haven’t already got an account, you will need to create this first, add your business/address and bank details then activate it. You can then link this to your .shop account with one click!
It’s similar to Paypal… funds from sales will appear in your account and then be paid into your bank either daily, weekly, monthly or on request.
You sure can, the site and dashboard are all mobile-friendly. You can even snap photos of your products and add them to your online listings all from your phone.
Why yes you can! These are called Product Variations and you can add these from your dashboard. E.g. Slice or Unsliced bread, Hard or Softback versions of a book, each with their own stock, prices, pictures etc.
Yes, if you sell items that could be sent to customers through the post, you can add a shipping cost to enable this. Customers will either see a ‘local delivery’ or ‘postal shipping’ depending on whether they live with your town’s postcode or outside it.
Yes it does! You can specify how much of each product (and product type) is in stock and every time an order is made, the stock will be adjusted for you.
You can set low stock thresholds for each of your products and you’ll then be emailed when stock gets this low.
Note: this won’t link-up with any other stock system you have, so you might have to manually adjust these as sales are made if you have an existing stock system or eCommerce website.
Yes! If you can export your stock in a spreadsheet from elsewhere, you can import it into this system (via a. csv file). Get in touch if you need a hand with this process or you want guidance for creating this from scratch in a spreadsheet (quicker than adding all products individually if you have loads!). We can probably do this from any site that lets you export your product e.g. Woocommerce, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Etsy & more, get in touch with us and see if we can help!
Our sites basically turn things how they usually work on their heads! They won’t include SEO for individual products, but they will generally for the town, shopping locally, independent shops and the product categories.
As anyone has found who has created a shop, that’s half the battle. The other half is promoting it online! With our .Shop site, our local promotional campaign that is included (posters, window stickers, POS advertising, press release template etc) with every site will create a buzz and let locals know about the site.
Basically, it will become a site that locals will go to without thinking about it as they might do currently with Amazon. The idea is to create a critical mass of products/shops online for your town on a website that locals will see via local media, social media, press and regularly use.
So! Are you ready to apply for the chance for your town to have it’s very own .Shop site?