eCommerce Business Plan

If you think that looking into the future of your business is not possible, make yourself comfortable! The Business Plan is a magical sphere in which you can see everything that can happen to your company and all the possibilities and threats offered by the market in which you are or will enter.
In this article you will find simple guidelines to create your own custom plan.
Whether you’re close to opening a new e-commerce site, or you’re in trouble or just want to figure out how far you still have to go, we suggest you take a look and get to work!

The business plan is a roadmap that describes your company, your products/services, financial forecasts, goals and strategies you will put in place to achieve them.
Some of these things you may already have in mind, some a little less. You can follow these tips to make sure you create your own complete business plan.

Start with an executive summary
This way you won’t miss any passage in the process. When you create very extensive, articulated documents, in which you enclose moments of reflection and analysis, it is easy to lose the thread. By creating a list you can be sure to go and analyze everything that is important. At each step, you can also add sub-stitches that you had previously omitted, but you realized that they will come in handy.

1. Value Proposition
What do you offer to your potential customers? What are the benefits that your customers can count on buying your product? It develops a promise of short and concise value, but also clear and exhaustive.

2. Description of the activity
Who is your company? What are the main activities? And the secondary ones? What do you want to achieve with the activities you do for the company and for your buyers?
In this section you should also define the structure of your e-commerce business and clarify your business model. This is where you need to take into account the history of your company, your key employees, the primary goals you had set for yourself when you left, and those that were added later.

3. Market analysis
On our blog you can find a detailed article rich in information on how to study their competitors and the target market. This is a very important activity, which we can not summarize in a few lines! So you can find the full article here!

4. Positioning
Where does your business fit into the market?
Are you an institution in your industry? A rising shop? Identify your strengths and weaknesses and identify possible changes that may occur in the market in which you operate. They can be negative (therefore threats) or positive (or opportunities).

5. Management
For this point you should have already defined an organizational structure (organization chart) of your company and the people who are part of it. It is a summary of the people involved in the various areas (or projects) and in which it is marked what are the responsibilities of each member of your team.
You may notice that there are holes or small areas open. This could be the perfect opportunity to redistribute tasks.

6. Products and services
Create a list of all your products. Each product then marks a short description, benefits, price, targets, sales channels and everything that can be useful to better understand what are the reasons why some of the products are sold more than others. If there are references close to launch, include them in this brochure.
This will give you a clear picture of what your audience needs most and what they need to meet.

7. Target
Get to know your audience better. Go beyond age, country of residence, income and gender.
What drives users to purchase today are the values, the emotional experiences offered, the understanding of needs.

Then look for data on:

• Level of education
• Hobby
• Values and beliefs

8. Buyer Personas and Buyer’s Journey
After you understand who your audience is, you need to draw in front of you a real person who might be interested in what you offer.
The Buyer Person is a detailed profile of your potential customer. It has a name, an age, an occupation, interests and hobbies, needs, a lifestyle, aspirations. Nothing you put in your buyer person has to be invented, but the result of the search you did on your target. It’s just a hypothetical combination of data.
Once you understand your potential customers, it will be easier to understand the Buyer’s Journey, that is, their purchase process.

9. Marketing
Once you’ve established all the features of your target audience and touchpoints, your marketing plan should be more intuitive. List the strategies and means you are currently using and whether there are any implementations or roads to abandon. Remember to also include the platforms on which your products will be available, their maintenance costs, how to promote your offer on them.

10. Business plan
Your workflow varies according to different aspects. From suppliers, to creation times, to delivery times. It is important to have defined these factors for the strategies and initiatives that could be undertaken from the point of view of marketing, budget or the creation of new products.

Ask yourself, among other things:

• Where does the production of your items take place?
• Who supplies the raw materials?
• What are the production and shipping times?
• How long does it take to create a product?
• Will you have a warehouse? How many products will be available there?
• To which couriers will you entrust the shipments?

11. Financial plan
Forecasting the cost and revenue of your business is critical to ensuring you are never at a loss. It is necessary to make an estimate of fixed and variable costs and understand what the revenues could be. Once you have identified the necessary expenses, you will be able to understand how to divide the remaining, between marketing, new tools, new initiatives etc…

As you may have guessed, creating a business plan for an ecommerce store is not a piece of cake. You have to put together data, ideas, predictions, a lot of time and elbow grease.
But it’s worth it if it can help you assess the feasibility of your ideas and feel safer when planning your marketing strategies.