Review Your Website eCommerce Requirements

The approach you take to build your eCommerce site should be similar to the approach you take when you start a new business, launch a new product or start a new marketing campaign. Success in all these endeavors to a large extent depends on a well-written detailed plan. You can increase the success rate dramatically for any project if you have a realistic implementation plan. The major challenges you will face while creating a development plan for your eCommerce website are generally as follows:

• Selecting the primary goal of the website
• Coming up with the needed business objectives to accomplish this goal
• Selecting the right functionalities to achieve these business objectives
• Having the right content material the site functionalities should produce and need

Primary Goal

Not all eCommerce sites are online stores. Apart from selling products and services directly from the virtual store there could be many other reasons to have an eCommerce site. Some are listed below:

• Build brands
• Enhance existing marketing programs
• Sell products and services
• Launch new product or service
• Develop a better understanding of the customer’s need
• Improve after sales support

Based on your primary goal, you have to take different strategic approach to planning your site.

Website Business Objectives

Website Business objectives are the list of processes you need to have on your website in order to attain your goal. If your goal is to sell products through your website you have to display pictures and specifications of your products to the site visitors, have a shopping cart so that a buyer can select products and have a payment system to carry the transaction, etc. These are your business objectives.

WebSite Functionality

System functionalities are a list of the types of website capabilities you need to achieve your business objectives. If one of the website’s business objectives is to send regular emails to buyers, you need to have an automatic mailing system. To display product information, i.e. product picture, specification, sale’s terms, etc. you will need an electronic catalog system. For processing a payment you require a payment gateway.

Website Information requirements

This is the information material the website functionalities have to generate to achieve your business objectives. To display product information you require product picture, product specifications, sale’s terms, shipping terms, payment terms, etc. To send mails to your buyers you need a list of email addresses. For executing a transaction the required information would be payment options and information for credit card processing etc.

Once you have clearly identified your single most important business goal for developing the website, and jotted down the needed business objectives, site functionalities and information requirement to realise the business objectives, you are ready to proceed with step by step development of your website.

Writing the development plan

This will require deep understanding of your business goals, website business objectives, content material and milestone goals for the overall development process. You will be able to acquire enough knowledge by analysing existing sites of competitors and researching data related to your specific industry. At this stage you will also clarify the resources necessary to build you site and assign responsibilities.

Register domain for the website

While you are still in the process of writing your development plan you should register a domain for your website. You will probably have heard about the amounts of money companies have paid out for domain names like business.com or golf.com. There is no point wasting money on fancy domain names. Any name is fine as long as it
is more or less consistent to your business line. Keep in mind two things: avoid special symbols in domain name and generally don’t select a name which is too long.

Create a one page simple website

After registering your domain name, you should start using it immediately. Design a single page mini website with information, what the upcoming site is going to have, and publish it online. The idea is to get online as soon as possible, because the older your site is the better from the point of view of search engine spiders.

Meta Tags for your home page

Write the title name of your site, description of your site, keywords, etc. Use them on your mini site.

Start registering your address in various directories

Now start registering your mini website in various directories and search engines. Don’t use the companies that promise to get your site listed in hundreds of search engines and directories. You only need to be in the major ones and most of them require manual insertion of site information.

Accumulate content

Write content for your website. This is a time consuming job. A good eCommerce site should have a minimum 80 to 100 pages. So obviously that means you will need a lot of content for your website.

Site plan

Loosely define the pages needed for the site and links between them.

Create project scope

The project scope is the way that you describe the objectives and functionalities of the web project. This gives you a clear picture of the site from a technical point of view. It shows the boundaries, i.e. what the project will deliver and what it will not deliver. For larger projects, it can include departments involved, business processes and workflows that will be touched upon, and the data types incorporated, etc.

Design home page and one of the main pages

Finally, it is the time to start designing your web pages. Start with creating a layout. Sketch and design the first page and at least one of the other major pages. You may probably need one or more designers for your site.

Create content surrounding two three key phrases per page

Meanwhile, select keywords and key phrases for these and other pages and start developing content surrounding these words and phrases. You might need to involve the content developer and search engine optimiser for this.

Select design and layouts for rest of the pages

If you are happy with the look and feel of the home page and the other page that you have created it is time to build layouts for rest of the pages.

Programming

Actually, you should start working on this the moment you finished writing your project scope. You will need programmers and a data base specialist to work on this part. The number of specialists required will depend on the complexity of the project.

Create the rest of the pages

Now is the time to develop the physical look of the rest of the pages. Don’t forget to create Meta Tags for these pages.

Installation on your local server

All your work will be done on a local server and the trial version of your site will reside there.

Testing and debugging

Now that the site is ready it is time to test all the functionalities of the site and check pages for broken links and other errors.

Let others review your site

If possible request your best customers, industry colleagues and friends to check out the site thoroughly and give you honest feedback. Make changes according to the suggestions that you think are valid and valuable.

Publish

Finally, the big day has arrived. Publish your website on the Internet. Make sure to issue a press release describing your website and how useful your eCommerce site will be.

Constantly monitor and update

In order to serve your audience better you will need to monitor your site. What is working well and what needs improvement? Update your website periodically with specific and quantifiable enhancements in line with the search keywords shown in your cPanel.

Promoting your Website

Having a great site is not good enough! You have to work on promoting your site so that enough targeted traffic visits your site to make it profitable.

Benefits of a well designed and constructed website

Companies can reap tremendous profits from a robust, well designed, well managed and constructed eCommerce website including these amongst others:

• Sales increase, sometimes many fold
• Better customer satisfaction
• More sales per head
• Less work for the sales force
• More profit per sale

Whilst building your website, take a systematic approach so that you can have your website developed on time, with allocated resources and without unpleasant surprises.

 Review of eCommerce Website Requirements