A successful eCommerce site requires upfront investment of time and effort for research and planning. In this Strategy In-a-Box, you will follow a proven methodology - a consistent step-by-step approach that combines industry best practices to guide your eCommerce site development.

1. ECOMMERCE STRATEGY
IN-A-BOX
Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance

2. ECOMMERCE METHODOLOGY
• A successful eCommerce site requires upfront investment of time
and effort for research and planning.
• Methodology - a consistent step-by-step approach that combines
industry best practices to guide your eCommerce site
development.
• Doing this, your eCommerce strategy will benefit from:
• Higher conversion rate
• Reduced cost in the eCommerce site lifecycle
• Increased user satisfaction & enhanced experience
• Search engine friendly sites
• Scalable eCommerce platform

3. ECOMMERCE METHODOLOGY

4. CLIENT INTERVIEWS
• Company vision, mission, tagline, strategy business proposition,
branding
• Industry completeness, naming and terminology, growth rate and
direct competitors
• Product attributes, variables, terminology, 80/20
• eCommerce site objectives and business goals
• Existing site analytics

5. TARGET AUDIENCE
• Understanding primary, secondary and tertiary
• Demographic, gender, age, socio-economics, geographic location,
web savvy, specific needs
• Exposure to current brands and products
• Brand oriented
• Price oriented

6. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
• Check out direct competitors (online) eCommerce site layouts,
model and unique functionalities
• Find out what competitors do well online and what they don’t
• Investigate opportunities using online media
• Search for indirect competitor offerings
• Analyze similar niche sites to learn more

7. SEO KEYWORD RESEARCH
• Keyword relevancy: do your site’s offerings satisfy the queries?
• Keyword popularity: do the query have significant search volume?
• Keyword clarity: is “egg” a product of a Chicken or a color?
• Commercial aspects: does the user typing this query want to buy?
Or just learn? You want to target buyers first!

8. OBJECTIVES AND EXPECTATIONS
• Desired features and functionalities to support products & users
• Timetable until product launch
• Desired market share for each eCommerce site
• “I want to be like”… examples of model eCommerce sites
• Adequately managed monthly & yearly budget to support
product development and maintenance

9. DELIVERABLES: RESEARCH FINDINGS
• The foundation of successful eCommerce sites is a clearly articulated
strategy. Knowing both:
• what you want each site to accomplish for our business/market
• what you want each site to accomplish for our users & customers
• helps with all decisions you have to make about every aspect of your
eCommerce sites.
The outcome of this phase: a clear sense of what each eCommerce site is
about and what the users & customers want.

10. TARGET AUDIENCE & PERSONAS
• Define primary, secondary and tertiary target audience based on
research findings
• Define personas (articulated summary of the characteristics, needs,
motivations and environment of your defined web users)
• Draw possible scenarios (case studies) for each of the personas

11. USER & FUNCTIONAL REQS
• Define basic site functionality
• Define advanced and unique site functionality
• Characterize custom user requirements (for each persona)
• Define user profile management requirements
• Identify transactional functions (shopping process, integration with
backend systems like inventory system, POS software etc.)
• Define administrative functionality and requirements

12. SEARCH & CONTENT REQS
• Content types and formats
• Content management requirements, authorizations, workflow
• User generated content areas, moderation, workflow
• Define search behavior and advanced search features to support
fast location of information
• Auto complete sources, automatic spell corrections, similar terms
display

13. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
• Expected user volumes for each site
• Security & authentication requirements
• Performance requirements (i.e. page load time)
• Support requirements
• Supported browser types, including browser resolutions

14. SEO REQUIREMENTS
• URL structure definition
• Homepage and all landing-page content accommodation
• Metadata scripting
• Dynamic sitemaps management (XML)
• Robots.txt file (re)definitions
• Custom 404 page content and structure
• Internal search management and tracking
• Analytics code implementation

15. LANDING PAGE UX
• 80/20 Landing page mapping
• Landing page layout and structure
• Landing page cross links and cohesiveness
• All top tab content must be indexable (no internal or htaccess
redirects)

16. CREATIVE BRIEF
• Returns your attention to those aspects of the sites your users
will notice first – the visual elements of the site
• Contains the brand identity, the type of audience, the “story”
each site should tell, the tone and imagery that each site should
take on

17. DELIVERABLES: ECOMMERCE REQUIREMENT
SPECIFICATIONS
Purpose: Translating users needs as stories and eCommerce
market and site objectives into specific requirements for what
content and functionality each site will offer.
Audience: Web development, Application development, brand/
product managers, stakeholders, sponsors, testers
The outcome of this phase: a list of all requirements - gives the
scope of what will be included in the final product (iteration).

18. NAVIGATION TREE
• Helps direct users browsing in the sites to ensure positive user
experience
• Prepare a detailed taxonomy of all elements of each site
• Cluster similar items into groups
• Prioritize groups by importance
• Highlight important items and place in higher location in tree
• Add navigation aids – sitemaps, quick links, cross links

19. LABELING & THEMATIC ARCHITECTURE
• Define a unique and clear label for each item in taxonomy (like
the label used for a specific feature or product variant)
• Make sure labeling is in correlation with SEO needs
• Make sure there is no semantic overlap between labels

20. FUNCTIONAL DESIGN / WIRE-FRAMES
• Functional design ensures that everyone knows exactly what the
scope of work is
• Designers and developers know exactly how and what they
should execute
• Identifies all features and where each should be placed
• Prioritizes features - the most important features are prominently
positioned on a page
• Sketch all site pages from homepage and landing pages to specific
pages

21. USER EXPERIENCE GUIDELINES
• UX guidelines should support creative designers and software
developers to create a user friendly application.
• Set measurable usability goals for applications (time, accuracy,
reusability, overall success, user satisfaction)
• Define how specific design elements behave.
• Define non-standard user interface components

22. DELIVERABLES: WIRE-FRAMES & UX GUIDELINES
Synchronize all requirements to develop a
functional design for each eCommerce site and
application. The functional design gives shape to
the mass of requirements, identifying specific
aspects of interface, navigation and information
design.
The outcome of this phase: a clear visual
presentation of the conceptualized eCommerce
site. This acts as a way to communicate with the
sponsors, stakeholders, clients, visual designers,
digital & traditional marketers, content creators,
and developers.

23. BEYOND STRATEGY IN-A-BOX
Executive Sponsor and Stakeholders will review each eCommerce Requirements
Specifications (ERS) and provide feedback
Product Owner will provide a price proposal for each eCommerce site Development
Phase (EDP)
This will help Executive Sponsor and Stakeholders choose which components of the
ERS will be included in each launch (iteration)
Product Owner will provide a timetable for the continuing progress of each launch
(iteration)