E-commerce

Getting Started and Making a Plan
When it comes to getting your e-commerce site started, don't just dive right into the deep end. Instead, get your feet wet with an advance plan. By looking before leaping, you'll learn about all the e-commerce gotchas that can hit you unexpectedly. Planning ahead will not only save you quite a bit of redevelopment time down the road, it will also help you make educated decisions as you choose the right e-commerce solution for your company.

Sales and Marketing Cycle

• Customer: Who are your target customers and what do they need?
• Awareness and advertising: How will you get customers to the store the first time? How will you get them to come back?
• Merchandising: What products will you offer and how will you position and display them to your customers?
• Sales service: How will you answer customers' questions and solve their problems?
• Promotions: How will you promote merchandise and services to give customers incentives to make purchases?
• Fulfillment: How will you pass orders to the fulfillment center?
• Post-sales service: How will you provide customer service and answers to order-status questions after the sale?
• Marketing data and analysis: What information about sales, customer, and advertising trends will you gather? How will you use it to make decisions?
• Brand: How will you communicate with customers during each of these interactions in a way that reinforces your unique company image?

Play by the "Business Rules" Document

At your D-Day, talk through all the steps that come before and after a transaction. Gather ideas. Discuss constraints and get the raw information you'll need to develop your e-business plan.

To help keep the ideas flowing and your brain-storming on track, here is a Business Rules document for you to use. This isn't a check list — it's simply a compilation of the e-business issues that you should consider as you carefully lay plans for your e-commerce site. Print it out and then use it to generate new ideas and spark innovations of your own.

With those priorities in line, your preliminary Requirements Document (aka The Plan) is just about ready to go. Click here for an example plan. (Note that yours will probably need to be a bit more detailed and will likely require a few revisions to get there.)

To find the most cost-effective marketing for your site, experiment with your advertising while keeping a sharp eye on your sales. Try new things: Implement innovative banner ads, play around with things like affiliate marketing, consider sponsorships — and see how your sales are affected.
And keep at it. Your online storefront, like your business itself, must continue to grow and change to accommodate the evolution of your customers and products.

This flexibility is key to keeping your e-business viable. Even if your products don't change much over the years, you need to constantly reevaluate and update your online presence. The quick and ever-changing nature of the Web can be daunting, but it can also bring customers, connections, and opportunities that never would have been possible otherwise.

As you set out to create your own e-commerce site, keep in mind all that we've discussed here. With planning, hard work, and careful observation, you can build a site that's flexible enough to keep up with the ever-changing needs of your customers. And then you'll really be in e-business.

A few facts:

Online consumer spending racked up its first $2 billion week ever for the seven days ending Dec. 6, an all-time weekly spending record, according to measurement and analysis firm comScore Networks.

And the Internet spending spree has continued into the following week, as spending on Monday, Dec. 8, reached $367.05 million, making it the largest sales day of the year to date, said comparison shopping site BizRate.com.

Spending on non-travel goods and services increased 38 percent versus the same period a year-ago to a record $1.4 billion, while travel spending increased 24 percent to $567 million, comScore said.

"While travel spending was the dominant force pushing e-commerce trends higher in the off-season, non-travel sales have now become the growth engine, as consumers come online in droves to take advantage of the Internet's convenience, competitive pricing and wide product selection,"
said Michelle David Adams, comScore vice president.

comScore's sales figures are based on measurements of actual buying activity conducted by a representative cross-section of more than 1.5 million Internet users at more than 50,000 online merchants and other commerce sites.

What's selling best? BizRate said the top sales categories are computer hardware (including digital cameras), electronics, entertainment, apparel, and toys and games.

From Nov. 1 to Dec. 9, 2002, online sales grew to $8.37 billion from $5.86 billion for the same period last year, a 43 percent increase, according to BizRate figures.

comScore's estimate of cumulative consumer online sales from Nov. 1, 2002 through the week ending Dec. 6 reached $8.2 billion, up 29 percent versus the same period last year.

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