How it works

We help you get your online shop launched as part of our inclusive help and support. This means we will style your online shop to your current business identity or to a design that you have had created.

Once your shop is up and running you have full control over the content of every page, so you, or your web developer, can access and change everything to suit your needs.

Adding products to your store is done quickly and easily using the control panel. You can load a product from our library or create one of your own from scratch. Products can be priced per item, per kilogram or per litre.

There are several thousand product images in our image library to help get you started, and we’re adding more all the time.

FoodCommerce has a variety of different delivery options which you can use in your store.

You can deliver locally in postcode defined areas, have your customers collect their orders from pick-up points, deliver nationally using a courier service, or a combination of all three.

Customers choose when their orders are delivered from the days and times you offer, in a similar way to shopping online with the supermarkets.

Marketing your online store is your responsibility but we try our best to help you as much as we can. All of our shops are search engine friendly and perform well in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. We offer a powerful discounting facility where various offers and claim codes can be added to your store. We can help you promote your website using online advertising such as Google AdWords.

Our sister product Online Connector provides email marketing, text messaging and social media services to help promote your online store.

When selling expensive loose or cut products such as meat and cheese you will want to charge for the actual weight you supply the customer. To do this you will need to take payment after you have prepared the order.

When a customer order is placed their card details are taken and securely stored in your Sage Pay or Cardsave account.

Once you have prepared the order you enter the exact weights in the control panel which recalculates the amount and takes the payment from the customer’s card.

Throughout the process the customer’s card details are completely secure and cannot be seen at anytime by anyone.

You will need either a Sage Pay or a Cardsave account to use with your FoodCommerce store. All your customer’s payments will go straight into your merchant bank account and your customer will see your company name on their bank statement.

Transactions are taken in real time throughout the day. These transactions are then collected up into an overnight process called “settlement”, which moves funds between the customer accounts and your merchant account. Your bank then transfers the funds from your merchant account into your bank account, usually at the same time.

All payments are taken securely and we are compliant with the PCI DSS standards all the UK banks require.

There is also an option to take orders without taking card payment details and instead collect payment on delivery. You choose on which delivery schemes this is allowed.

An overnight process decides the orders you need to start preparing based on the delivery day and the time you need. The order status is moved from “open” to “picking in progress” meaning the customer can no longer make changes and you can begin to put it together.

FoodCommerce provides you with a pick-list to tell you what needs to be done and a delivery note to include with the order.

When you are busy you can print many pick-lists at once, produce product reports summarising what you need, and when you have finished a transaction report to tell you what you did.

Everything technical is managed by us on your behalf. We look after the hosting, the security certificates, your domain name and even your email if you want us to.

The FoodCommerce application is entirely written by ourselves and we are continually working on it adding new features and improving on existing ones.

The easy to use control panel is where you manage your orders and products on a daily basis. For things you do less often, like set up a new delivery scheme or create a new page we are here to help should you need it.

Free help and support by email and telephone is included with all FoodCommerce stores.

When you first set up your FoodCommerce store we will guide you through the process and help you put your store together and get it launched.