Online shop

In general an online shop will consist of the following components.

• The home page. This is your shop window
• Sub pages. This is where you can showcase some of your products, your staff, the business's location etc.
• A sign up page. This is where new customers can put their details
• A sign in page. Where customers log in to do their shopping, etc.
• The shopping trolley through to checkout pages. Where the customer selects and pays for your goods.
• A database. This is where you'll store the prices, photos, etc of your goods along with orders, invoices, accounts
• A payment system such as paypal

It isn't always necessary to have all of these in order to run a business online. For instance you may just require a page displaying your products and an email address or phone number. If, however, you believe that you are going to be dealing with large numbers of orders or orders that contain many individual items, it can save time and money in the future to have the machinery in place to deal with this. If you don't, you may end up having to type in all of those orders again to work out how much you owe to the tax man.

With a properly integrated system most, if not all, of your bookkeeping can be done without you lifting a finger. This can even include reordering when stocks run low.