Congratulations on starting your journey into eCommerce. This has the opportunity to transform your organization, but it needs to be approached with purpose.
There are 5 stages of maturity – your first job is to build the Foundation.
Vince Lombardi started out every season by holding up a game ball and slowly saying, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”
The foundation is the key to success. If you build your business on a strong foundation, then it will not fail. With the right foundation, all of our “fDigitalBranch Secrets” will amplify what you do… without it, it won’t matter what you attempt, because your impact will not last long.
The X eCommerce System
We base the insights below on the X eCommerce System that covers planning, people, technology, product content, customer experience, analytics and operations for your Digital Branch.
We wrote a book about it to help you understand all these components. You can get it for FREE:
STEP 1: You have to start with a plan, strategy and roadmap.
The plan is the business case and the roadmap you will use to build from. Spend time and effort to build a comprehensive strategic plan that encompasses each element of the system: people, technology, UX, analytics, product content, and operations.
If you are not sure where to start, check out this article on Building Your Strategy.
Understanding Customer Adoption vs. Customer Aquisition
Understanding the difference between Customer Acquisition and Customer Adoption is important. Check out this video explaining the difference.
Still struggling? If so, we recommend these resources
STEP 2: Understand what your customer wants (journey mapping and user stories)
Don’t build things your customers don’t want. Start by interviewing your customers and using a tool called Journey Mapping to deeply understand exactly what your customer needs to help them do their job easier.
STEP 3: Select the right Technology
If you visit each of the leading vendors’ websites or listen to their webinars you will realize how similar the vendors sound. You might be confused at the end of those presentations. Most of the enterprise eCommerce vendors have been around for a while and have robust capabilities. However, there are some essential differences between the vendors that could affect your decision. First, understand what out-of-the-box is and what is customized. Often, the system demo-ed is a sales tool that has been heavily customized.
STEP 4: Design your Customer Experience
Start creative the user experience and design of your site. This should be a data-driven exercise, drawing from what you know about your customers and your business objectives and the capacity of your selected platform.
If you have the time and capability, now is a time to do a Journey Mapping exercise to articulate who your customer personas are and how your website can best serve them. Apply knowledge you have from your current site, competitive analysis and best practices to create a customer-centric UX and design. Strong technology and tight ERP integration is important; however, it must work hand in hand with a clean and intuitive UX and design.
STEP 5: Build and implement your site
After you’ve selected a platform vendor who is experienced and understands your business requirements, then you begin what will be a lengthy a and expensive phase: implementation. You will need to have resources dedicated to project management of the site implementation and to test the site. This can be internal or external, but it should be in addition to the actual implementation partner(s).
STEP 6: Plan and execute your launch
Now that you finally have the site implemented, how do you get customers adopting (using) the site? As they say, this is not: “if you build it, they will come.” For this phase, you will need to give people the information and reason to be excited to visit your site.