We can launch your shop online today

Having worked with a wide variety of e-commerce software options over the years, including Magento, we generally recommend our clients use Shopify, a leading hosted e-commerce service: its tools are richly featured, easy-to-use and, with the ability to upgrade and add third-party apps, it covers all the bases for the vast majority of small businesses - at an incredibly reasonable price

The starter plan is just £25 per month plus a small commission per transaction and allows unlimited products, images and bandwidth and offers 24/7 support; secure card payments; excellent merchandising tools; inventory management; Facebook shop creation; discounting; and code-level flexibility to adapt any page - and much, much more

You can also add on its ePOS service, an iPad or iPhone, a card reader and a till to run your physical shop, streamlining your inventory management and integrating your customer data

If you opt to use their payment service, it can cost as little as 1.5% + 25p per online transaction and just 1.5% in-store. It is secure, accepts all major cards and contactless payments and makes refunds and restocking easy

In comparison, Magento, the market leader for larger businesses, will almost certainly cost £100,000s per year to implement, maintain, host and support - and, in may ways, the user experience for administrators is fiddlier and slower to use We don't think a small business need look any further than Shopify - we use it ourselves every day to manage our own e-commerce website Visit Shopify.co.uk | View Shopify Pricing