Site strategy

The planning process

The planning process is the key stage in producing a successful profitable web site.

We will work with you and your client to create a plan for your site.  This plan will drive your design effort and our development effort and make sure we deliver the site that you need. 

We will produce a plan that covers:

• Your project – any specific objectives, timescales and organisation
• Your offering – what will you be selling and why will customers buy
• Marketing – how will the site be marketed
• The web site – how the site will work
• Pricing and handling money
• Other operational issues like - Deliveries, returns, back orders etc.
• Measuring performance

We have a checklist to use during this phase. Click here to download the white paper in pdf format.

Your offering

1. Sell the most profitable lines only on the web site to keep the size and cost of the site to a minimum
2. Sell all the products you stock
3. Sell a wider range than you currently do.

The cost of adding a single product to the web site is zero, however if the number of products is large, then at some point the site needs more organisation, more complex searching and so on. So the cost is related to the number of products, but it is not a simple straight-line relationship. 

Adding new products can be expensive if you have to carry extra stock. However can you get a supplier to deliver straight to the consumer, or straight to your shipping operation?  This is called drop shipping and may allow you to add more products which can be cross-sold to your customer basis at very low cost.

How will the site work

The appearance of the site is going to be your focus during the design stage. Get the designers off to a flying start by starting to think about your customer base, and what sort of design will motivate them to stay on the site and buy from you.

We will decide how we will organise the the product indexes and any special searching that is needed. Typical issues (See our checklist):

• Searching and indexing: If you expect the web site to supplement the printed catalogue you may want a search by catalogue page number or product code. If the number of products is very large we may have several levels of indexes as well as cross links to related products.
• 'My account' functions: We will discuss with you what functions we should offer to your clients such as returning customer login, review of previous orders, wish list and so on.
• User registration: In some situations it is worthwhile to ask users to partially register before they add items to their shopping basket. We suggest only asking for enough information to be able to contact them if they leave before completing the purchase.

Marketing

We will talk to you about the best way of marketing the site:

• The market: What do we know about the market for your products? What is it about your product that we should be emphasising to encourage sales?
• Methods: How will you market your products? Will your web site supplement a printed catalogue, or do you want it to ultimately replace the printed catalogue? Are you looking to the web to expand your customer base or primarily to service existing customers?
• PPC and search engines: Will you want to use Pay Per Click, Organic search engine optimisation or direct mail?
• Competition: How many online competitors do you have? We can find this out.
• Newsletter: We will discuss the benefits of a regular email newsletter to customers with new products and special offers.

At this stage you will probably say ‘all of the above’ and no marketing method should be ignored. However it is useful to have an idea early on even if we know that “no plan survives the first battle”.

Pricing and taking payments

Pricing issues will include:

• Offers: You can advertise 'offer codes' which give customers a discount. This is often a good way of tracking the value of advertising.
  Trade accounts: Some customers may have a permanent discount or even their own price list.
• Multi-currency: If your customer base is international we will need to discuss the currencies they will wish to pay in
• Shipping: The issue of shipping costs often causes problems, and it is important that we identify any issues and resolve them.

For a more detailed discussion of the options for payment processing, you may wish to read our white paper 'an ecommerce primer'.

• Payment cards: You will probably want to take Visa and mastercard. You may also want to accept American Express or even the government procurement card.
• Invoicing: Some customers may prefer to be invoiced. You may want to restrict this to certain customers who have passed your credit checks.

Back office

We will discuss other operational issues.

• Volumes: The volume of business will effect the way you work with the system and the hosting requirements. We need to estimate the volume of sales and any seasonal factors.
• Your shipping operation: We need to understand how we will pass orders to your back office.
• Interface to your computer system: We may need to develop programs to link to your warehousing or accounting system:
  • Upload product details and prices
  • Upload stock levels
  • Download customer information
  • Download order information