The Recipe for Success: Important Factors You Should Know When Building an E-Commerce Presence
With the continuous development of science and technology, great changes have taken place in the way people acquire and process information. For example, in the face of tremendous pressure from other media and websites, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which has a history of more than 100 years, has redesigned its website and mobile app since 2015; And improve the user experience by constantly improving visual effects and integrating invalid apps in time, etc. the result is that in 2008, 10% of WSJ’s traffic came via mobile devices. However, by 2016, that figure had reached 55% and it continues to grow.
Obviously, following the development of science and technology, building an e-commerce presence is not only the trend of e-commerce, but also the content that must be considered when designing business model. In general, this blog will tell how to build a successful e-commerce presence from the following three aspects: the questions you should ask yourself, the steps to build business model, and the other things worth attention.
Ask Yourself Some Questions Before Starting Your Business
Vision
Before you want to plan or actually build an e-commerce presence, the vision of what you hope to accomplish and how you hope to do it. It is normal the e-commerce presence you want to build may not have all-encompassing ambitions, but a succinct statement of mission, purpose, and direction is the key factor in driving the development of your project.
Money
Once the mission or vision is defined, you need to start thinking about where the money will be coming from. The detailed revenue and cost projections at this point are not necessary. Instead, you need a preliminary but general idea of how your business will generate revenues.
Audience
There are two important questions you must figure out: who is your target audience and where can you best reach them?
Characteristics of the market
Figuring out the Characteristics of the market is also of great importance. Features of the marketplace to focus on include the demographics of the market and how an e-commerce presence fits into the market, and the structure of the market: competitors and substitute products.
You could make a list of the top five or ten competitors and try to describe their market share, and distinguish characteristics.
Content of the site
The content is the single most important foundation for revenue and ultimate success. Knowing where’s the content come from and how the content could catch visitors’ attention is the key point,
Know yourself
That is, knowing the weakness of yourself and trying to overcome it.
Develop an e-commerce presence map
There are four different kinds of e-commerce presence: website/app, e-mail, social media, and offline media. You have to think about how you develop a presence in these different virtual places.
Timeline
That is, set a timeline for yourself and complete the goals on time.
Preliminary idea of the costs
It is a good time to develop a preliminary idea of the costs involved before you start your own business.
Steps to build business model
A business model is simply a plan that describes how the business intends to make money. It describes who your customer base is and how you will provide value to them and the associated financing details. Next, I will introduce you to what to consider before building a business model and the steps to build it.
First of all, the business model canvas is a strategic management tool that lets you visualize and assess your business idea or concept. That’s what you should do before building business model. In short, it includes nine components: key partners, key activities, value proposition, customer relationships, customers, costs, key resources, channels, and revenue.
Building an e-commerce presence requires a systematic approach, and there are mainly the following steps:
Creating a plan document
Building an e-commerce presence requires that you systematically consider the many factors that go into the process.
Systems planning
Then you should create a plan document. One methodology is the systems development life cycle. The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a methodology used to understand the business goals of any system and design an appropriate solution.
System design
After identifying business objectives, system functionality, and information requirements, you must come up with a system design specification, including hardware and software platforms.
Building the system
When building the systems, there are many choices that range from outsourcing everything (including the actual systems analysis and design) to building everything yourself (in-house). After fully comparing the advantages and disadvantages of the two, choose the one that suits you best.
Testing the system Implementation and maintenance
The last step is test, implementation and maintenance.
-Other things you should know
In addition to the above steps, to build a successful e-commerce presence, you need to have a certain amount of knowledge of systematic architecture, which refers to the arrangement of software, the machinery and tasks in the information system required to achieve a specific function.. What’s more, choosing hardware is also important, including right sizing the demand side and right sizing the supply side.
All in all, knowing important factors when building an e-commerce presence is definitely the recipe for success. Only when the above points are truly achieved will it be more likely to succeed in e-commerce.
