1. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
What’s the idea? (The visioning process)
Before you can plan and actually build an e-commerce presence, you need to have a vision of what you hope to accomplish and how you hope to accomplish it.
It starts with a dream of what’s possible, and concludes with a timeline and preliminary budget for development.
For examples:
Amazon: To become the largest marketplace on earth
Facebook: To make the world more open and connected
Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
Theknot: To be the Internet’s comprehensive, one-stop wedding planning solution

2. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
Where’s the money: Business and revenue model
You will need to develop a preliminary idea of your business and revenue models (a general idea of how your business will generate revenues.
Basic business models are: portal, e-tailer, content provider, transaction broker, market creator, service provider, and community provider (social network).
The basic revenue model alternatives are: advertising, subscriptions, transaction fees, sales, and affiliate revenue.
There’s no reason to adopt a single business or revenue model, and in fact, many firms have multiple models.

3. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
Who and where is the target audience
There are two questions here:
Who is your target audience?
Where can you best reach them?
Your target audience can be described in a number of ways: demographics, behavior patterns (lifestyle), current consumption patterns (online vs. offline purchasing), digital usage patterns, content creation preferences (blogs & social networks), and buyer personas (profiles of your typical customer).
Understanding the demographics of your target audience is usually the first step.

4. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
What is the field? Characterize the marketplace
Enter into a declining market filled with strong competitors, and you will multiply your chances of failure.
Enter into a market that is emerging, growing, and has few competitors, and you stand a better chance.
Enter a market where there are no players, and you will either be rewarded handsomely with a profitable monopoly on a successful product no one else thought of or you will be quickly forgotten because there isn’t a market for your product at this point in time.
In addition, you will want to know about the structure of the market: direct competitors, suppliers, and substitute products.

5. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
Where’s the content coming from?
The content is why your customers visit your site and either purchase things or look at ads that generate revenue for you.
Therefore, the content is the single most important foundation for your revenue and ultimate success.
There are generally two kinds of content:
Static content is text and images that do not frequently change, such as product descriptions, photos, or text that you create to share with your visitors.
Dynamic content is content that changes regularly, can be created by you, or increasingly, by bloggers and fans of your Web site and products.

6. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
Know yourself: Conduct a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is a simple but powerful method for strategizing about your business and understanding where you should focus your efforts.
Lack of financial and human resources are typically the biggest weakness of start-up sites.
Threats include competitors that could develop the same capabilities as you, and low market entry costs, which might encourage many more start-ups to enter the marketplace.
Once you have conducted a SWOT analysis, you can consider ways to overcome your weaknesses and build on your strengths.

7. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
Develop an E-commerce presence map
E-commerce has moved from being a PC-centric activity on the Web to a mobile and tablet-based activity as well.
While 80% or more of e-commerce today is conducted using PCs, increasingly smartphones and tablets will be used for purchasing.
An e-commerce presence requires firms to consider the four different kinds of presence (Web site/App, social media, , and offline media), and the platforms and activities associated with each type of presence.
Offline media, the fourth type of e-commerce presence, is included here because many firms use multiplatform or integrated marketing where print ads refer customers to Web sites and apps.

8. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
E-commerce presence map

9. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
Develop a timeline: Milestones
It’s a good idea for you to have a rough idea of the time frame for developing your e-commerce presence when you begin.
You should break your project down into a small number of phases that could be completed within a specified time.
The next table illustrates a one-year timeline for the development of a start-up Web site.
Note that this example timeline defers the development of a mobile plan until after a Web site and social media plan have been developed and implemented.
There is a growing trend, however, to flip this timeline around, and begin with a mobile plan instead.

10. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
E-commerce presence timeline
PHASE
ACTIVITY
MILESTONE
Phase 1: Planning
Envision e-commerce presence; determine personnel
Mission statement
Phase 2: Web site development
Acquire content; develop a site design; arrange for hosting the site
Web site plan
Phase 3: Web implementation
Develop keywords and metatags; focus on search engine optimization; identify potential sponsors
A functional Web site
Phase 4: Social media plan
Identify appropriate social platforms and content for your products and services
A social media plan
Phase 5: Social media implementation
Develop Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest presence
Functioning social media presence
Phase 6: Mobile plan
Develop a mobile plan; consider options for porting your Web site to smartphones
A mobile media plan

11. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
How much will this cost?
How much you spend to build a Web site depends on how much you can afford, and the size of the opportunity.
In general, the cost of hardware, software, and telecommunications for building and operating a Web site has fallen dramatically in the last decade, making it possible for very small entrepreneurs to build fairly sophisticated sites.
At the same time, while technology has lowered the costs of system development, the costs of marketing, content development, and design have risen to make up more than half of typical Web site budgets.
The longer-term costs would also have to include site and system maintenance.

12. Imagine Your E-commerce Presence
Components of a Web site budget

13. Web Site Design: Basic Business Considerations
At a minimum, your customers will need to find what they need at your site, make a purchase, and leave.
A Web site that annoys customers runs the risk of losing the customer forever.
Some critics believe poor design is more common than good design.
The worst e-commerce sites make it difficult to find information about their products and make it complicated to purchase goods; they have missing pages and broken links, a confusing navigation structure, and annoying graphics or sounds that you cannot turn off.

14. E-commerce Web Site Features that Annoy Customers
Requiring user to view ad or Flash introduction before going to Web site content
Requirement to register and log in before viewing content or ordering
Pop-up and pop-under ads and windows
No contact information available
Too many clicks to get to the content
Unnecessary splash/flash screens, animation, etc.
Confusing navigation; no search function
Music or other audio that plays automatically
Links that don’t work
Unprofessional design elements
Inability to use browser’s Back button
Text not easily legible due to size, color, format
Slow loading pages
Typographical errors
Content that is out of date
No or unclear returns policy

15. Important Factors in Successful E-commerce Site Design
DESCRIPTION
Functionality
Pages that work, load quickly, and point the customer toward your product offerings
Informational
Links that customers can easily find to discover more about you and your products
Ease of use
Simple foolproof navigation
Redundant navigation
Alternative navigation to the same content
Ease of purchase
One or two clicks to purchase
Multi-browser functionality
Site works with the most popular browsers
Simple graphics
Avoids distracting, obnoxious graphics and sounds that the user cannot control
Legible text
Avoids backgrounds that distort text or make it illegible

16. Tools for Web Site Optimization
A Web site is only as valuable from a business perspective as the number of people who visit.
Web site optimization means how to attract lots of people to your site.
One solution is through search engines such as Google, Bing, Ask, and several hundred others.
The first stop for most customers looking for a product or service is to start with a search engine, and follow the listings on the page, usually starting with the top three to five listings, then glancing to the sponsored ads to the right.
The higher you are on the search engine pages, the more traffic you will receive.
Page 1 is much better than Page 2.

17. How do you get to Page 1 in the natural (unpaid) search listings?
Metatags, titles, page contents:
Search engines “crawl” your site and identify keywords as well as title pages and then index them for use in search arguments.
Pepper your pages with keywords that accurately describe what you say you do in your metatag site “description” and “keywords” sections of your source code.
Identify market niches:
Be more specific to attract small and specific groups, and closer to purchasing.
Offer expertise:
Industry analyses, FAQ pages, guides, and histories are excellent ways to build confidence on the part of users and to encourage them to see your Web site as the place to go for help.

18. How do you get to Page 1 in the natural (unpaid) search listings?
Get linked up:
Encourage other sites to link to your site; build a blog that attracts people and who will share your URL with others and post links in the process.
Build a Facebook page for your company.
Buy ads:
Complement your natural search optimization efforts with paid search engine keywords and ads.
See what works, and observe the number of visits to your site produced by each keyword string.
Local e-commerce:
If your Web site is particularly attractive to local people, or involves products sold locally, use keywords that connote your location, such as “Chiang Mai handicraft”, so people can find you nearby.

19. Personalization Tools & the Information Policy Set
You will definitely want to know how to treat each customer on an individual basis and emulate a traditional face-to-face marketplace.
Personalization: the ability to treat people based on their personal qualities and prior history with your site
Customization: the ability to change the product to better fit the needs of the customer
The primary method for achieving personalization and customization is through the placement of cookie files on the user’s client computer.
You will need to develop a privacy policy – a set of public statements declaring to your customers how you treat their personal information that you gather on the site.