An online chandlery has opened a High Street shop selling everything from marine electronics to electric scooters.

The Marine Partnership, founded in May 1999, claims to have been the first online chandlery in the UK.

It has just opened a shop called Zunamee in Hove.

Although the company originally specialised in selling marine equipment to boat owners, it has grown to offer a wide range of leisure equipment.

This includes the 17mph electric scooters, which can travel up to six miles on one battery charge.

The Marine Partnership was founded by the father and son team of Mike and Stuart Vernon after Mike, a management consultant, decided to set up an online business to learn more about the internet.

Company director Stuart started work on the site while completing a business studies degree at Brighton University.

He said: "The whole thing was very challenging because I had to teach myself everything.

"I couldn't even code a simple page when I began, let alone design an e-commerce site."

Stuart said the internet provided many advantages for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), helping them to attract customers worldwide.

"We get a lot of orders from the United States, Europe and especially Scandanavia. There's a company in Florida that buys a US-made product from us because it's cheaper the UK."

"People have been encouraged to shop online and the purchase guarantees have been put in place to protect cardholders from fraud."

People were taking advantage of new rules designed to protect online consumers.

He said: "They will buy five or six items of clothing online to try them on.

"Because of distance-selling regulations, if they don't like them, they have seven days to return them even if there's nothing wrong."

Stuart is working with a US web site specialist, Barney Stone, to redesign the site to provide a proper back-up system and better technology to process orders and manage customer relationships.

He said: "Many SMEs know what facilities they need but software companies encourage businesses to fit round their applications, rather than attempting to change the applications as required."

He said the new site would offer more than 10,000 products but would maintain only a small inventory because most suppliers were geared for next-day deliveries.

www.marineparts.co.uk