5 questions for a new ecommerce site

The Q's

Ask yourself the following questions

• 1. What is the objective of my site?
• 2. Who is my competition, if anybody, and what are they doing?
• 3. Where is this going in the next 5 years?
• 4. What type of maintenance will the site require?
• 5. Who is my audience, how will I obtain and retain them?

Getting to the A's

Okay it's really more like 8 questions, but the title sounded better at 5

What is the objective of my site?

This may seem like a silly question... the answer usually being "to sell my product" or "to let people know about this or that", but in my line of work it's one that often goes overlooked

Clients are usually in such a rush to "Get On The Internet", I am usually the first one to define for them the objective.

Determining this is really a simple process. If you purpose is to sell products decide the following:

• How do I plan to accept payment?
• How will I deliver the merchandise? UPS? FedEx? USPS?
• Are there limiting factors to a website? And should I limit my inventory?

In the end your objective should be something like the following:

The objective of our site is to gain, otherwise missed, customers by
accepting payment through Paypal for the majority of our stock
inventory and limiting custom orders to call-in or email requests for
the next year.

If the venture proves profitable we will then move towards a
larger-scale ecommerce solution to provide for further
variations of our product.  

We will utilize our existing relationship with UPS for
distribution, so that we may incorporate shipping notifications into
our ordering process.

Our success criteria for this project is as follows.....

Who is my competition, if anybody, and what are they doing?

The competition you find on the internet may differ greatly from the competition in the real world... In order to find your "virtual" competition simply fire up your favorite search engine and search for phrases a consumer might use when looking for your business.

Look over the competitions' websites, look for similarities, strengths, weaknesses... Even go so far as to order a small item from them. Get the full experience of what's already out there. Then figure out if you can do it better.

Where is this going in the next 5 years?

Trying to foresee the inevitable changes to an ecommerce application is quite difficult.

However, we can deduce one thing... change will come.

A long term plan should have an overall objective and a success criteria. Meaning, where would we like to be and how do we measure our progress?

If you sell widgets and in your first quarter of online retailing you sell 10 widgets, in your second quarter 20 widgets, you then have some meaningful data which will help provide a roadmap for future plans.

You may plan to sell 100 widgets during the fourth quarter. Did we sell 100 widgets in the fourth quarter becomes your success criteria.

In addition to simply applying the logic that dictates how to get from point A to point B, you also need to consider the technical requirements of scaling up quickly or slowly. do we have access to the appropriate hardware? Is bandwidth going to become an issue in the near future? Can we increase the performance of our application?

In addition to hardware and programming concerns, modifying you virtual store should be approached from a user-focused point of view as well. are people finding the items they want? Quickly? Could the ordering process be easier?

An online ecommerce application can be prove to be your best marketing tool, but the pitfalls can be very different from those in the real world.

What type of maintenance will the site require?

Managing an online ecommerce application can become very time consuming.

Establishing bot a schedule and a responsible party or parties for regular updates and maintenance is vital

Keeping content fresh on your site is how we gain repeat customers in the virtual world.

Who is my audience, how will I obtain and retain them?

As in the real world, your virtual customers will have similarities.

Age ranges, sex, tax bracket...

Inviting your customers to interact with your site in the form of Newsletters, Forums, Chat rooms, Classified Ads... will greatly improve your relationship with them and their relationship with your products. but you must know who they are first.

As a web developer/designer this is one of the first questions I ask each and every client. while the owner of the company maybe a weekend biker, if his clients are soccer moms we wont be throwing the GHarley logo and flames all over the website. We need to convey a look and a feel for the customer. If your customers are not internet savvy, keep it as simple as possible. General rule of thumb: Keep It Simple. If they are computer geeks, like myself, keep it as simple as possible.