E-commerce, more often referred to as an 'online shop', is no longer out of reach of small businesses and start-ups. There are many platforms out there that can be bolted onto a website, some good, some better, some costly, others less so...

We all have our favourites and we tend to stick with what we know. Here at Island Web Design we have fully integrated the Ecwid online shopping platform into our websites, and while no online store can be all things to all people, we have had great success with it.

Of course, if you are already using another platform, such as Shopify, we can certainly build you a website and attached your online shop to it. But what we can't do, is then use this amazing new feature: 'Product Image Galleries'.

How Product Image Galleries increase online visibility

The Product Image Galleries are essentially image galleries that look at your store categories and display all the products in it, in a customisable format. Great for if you want to create a 'Lookbook' on your home page, but even better for creating dedicated pages for each of your categories.

Traditionally, bolt-on e-commerce platforms, unlike bespoke online shops as used by the shopping giants, rely on a page to host their 'store widget' or the shop's 'front door', so to speak. On this page, the visitor would typically find the various categories and click on one to view the products within that category.

So, for example, a clothing shop may have categories for tops, trousers, knitwear, accessories, suits etc. Great for organising your products but this doesn't do anything for your SEO or online visibility.

What we want is a dedicated page for each of your major product ranges. That way, we can use the name of the range in the page title and description, and we can optimise the page for SEO and sharing on social media.

With Product Image Galleries, we can do just that. And every time you add a new product, or even if you change the entire range, the Product Gallery Widget instantly updates and shows the latest products.

The products can be shown with the title, description and price and this is fully customisable, so we maintain the look and feel of your website.

What is more, when a product becomes out of stock, or if you decide to lower the price of a product, a label will appear to indicate the status of the product as either 'Out of stock' or 'On Sale!'.

An added feature of our Product Image Galleries is the ability to filter products by the following the conditions:

• New Arrivals - This gallery will only show images that have been added to the shop in the last 30 days.
• On Sale - This gallery will only show the products that have been priced down.

This is a great feature but has a couple of conditions. Using these filters means you either have to remove the gallery if you have no recently added products (or you need to make sure you keep adding new products at least once a month) and you must maintain a stock of priced down products or the galleries will have nothing to show and an empty hole will appear in your website.

This is easily solved by temporarily hiding them when there are no products to display and this is, of course, why you have your website with Island Web Design and take advantage of our management package with 1 hour of free updates every month. A quick message to our office and we will update the site as required!