Typical for New businesses, Existing Businesses with no e-Commerce or those evaluating re-platforming.
- Strategy & Planning based on the high level targets and goals
- Why do we need eCommerce?
- Why does it support our organisations goals?
- What happens to us if we don’t introduce eCommerce?
- What are our competitors doing?
- Why does eCommerce make us more profitable?
- Why does eCommerce free up more time for active sales?
- Why does eCommerce develop our sales volumes?
- Why should we invest time & money into a platform?
- What is a good platform to select?
- How do we evaluate?
- Why is a particular platform good for us?
- Where are we now and where do we want to be?
- What does this look like in terms of time, investment, return?
- How do we measure our success?
Here’s an example for the question: Why do we need eCommerce?
Probably one of the best classic but more important questions to ask despite in 2023 this question would be relatively quite easy to answer, but cast your mind back to a time where e-commerce was still being adopted by many well known companies. “Why do we need eCommerce?”. The business case for e-commerce is closely matched to sales conversion funnel.
So this ‘Why’ question is often answered by analysing three areas:
- Efficiency of sales: Ecommerce is effectively automation, so sales processes are self served by the customer enabling extra capacity for sales teams to increase exposure with customers and adopt active sales models.
- Ease of Purchase / Average Order Volume: Ecommerce is the best platform for showcasing products visually, providing product information to make the purchase decision easier for the customer. Analytics and data points from customer behaviour enables reports and A.I. models to further refine product assortments and predict purchase behavior.
- Incremental Sales / Business Development: Adoption of B2B customers over traditional channels, reaching new markets and developing inbound marketing (such as SEO, Social Media, Blog Posts). Analytics and trend reports enable visibility for new product assortment ideas (as an example).
- Data monetisation & A.I: E-Commerce Platforms when established can introduce data points which are used for building models and as inputs for A.I to produce insights. Many free platforms such as Google Analytics, offer out of the box data points and reports. Other examples of this could be, personalised recommendations on the checkout, campaign automation based on triggers. With B2B sales, active sales teams having high quality sales leads automated by A.I. based on the analysis of behavior data of the customer through voice to text sentiment analysis and browsing behaviour. Data is attractive for suppliers, it can be leveraged for negotiating better margins and improving product information if they were to get your real market data reports.
And one of my favourites, data can be used for business case calculation and prioritising investments. When KPIs are designed, agreed for investments into eCommerce, it becomes very tangible and builds trust with the stakeholders as you’ll be able to provide a source of truth to the development of the metrics. This can be often an intimidating aspect in projects but, not if you have benchmark experience on the team to guide the process.
Hey- I’m offerering a free 30 minute sparring session with no obligations. We can use our sparring session time to discuss anything you wish.
So why wait? Let’s spar and generate some eCommerce ideas for your business today.