Improving eCommerce Strategy and Execution Starts With This.

Discover, discuss, define, decide. 

In today’s evolving digital age, there are few investments worthy of more consideration than the launch of a new eCommerce business.

These considerations require attention from IT and Business stakeholders alike. The execution of such an effort requires participation from people across many departments and disciplines (employees & partners) to ensure the final solution delivers the intended business value and reliability.

Setting eCommerce Strategy and Direct Execution

Align execution with strategic directives, roadmap, and timing.

Strategy

Strategy planning is essential to clarifying and communicating a vision of the future. It’s not a static activity or document. It is a collaborative process that aligns leadership vision with tactical execution. You will want to recognize trends, identify market opportunities, define goals, execute tactics, establish best practices, measure progress, and continuously inform and improve your strategy.

Consider the architecture

eCommerce platforms provide the foundation for businesses to build and grow their online commerce channels. These modern platforms provide impressive out-of-box capabilities and robust tooling to extend and customize the solution that best fits your business objectives. These solutions, however, often require extensive integration with enterprise systems and 3rd- party service providers to efficiently orchestrate and automate the administration and delivery of services.

Your internal team or in partnership with an eCommerce agency, work to focus on defining the platform configurations, customizations, integrations, and data exchanges required to deliver your initial MVP (minimum viable product) solution and establish an architectural foundation for future phases. The overall goal of launching your initial launch with an MVP is to deliver the features necessary for a successful eCommerce website in the shortest amount of time.

Define user experiences that delight 

When launching a new eCommerce business or evolving an existing one, few areas are more critical to its success than the interactive experiences you deliver online. As digitally savvy consumers, we prefer the brands and sites we visit to provide the intuitive conveniences we have come to expect. These intuitive expectations also influence how we conduct commerce in the business world and often have a much greater effect.

Focusing on UX Discovery & Strategy will ensure your teams have a clear understanding of the people you serve, the decision-making journeys they engage in, the preference and personalization you provide, and the site structure and interactions that will best serve their needs and contribute to your business objectives.

The process:

  1. Define Vision / Mission
  2. Specify Strategic Directives
  3. Discuss Strategic Calendars

These discussions should include topics like user experience, technology, the scope of work, roadmap, timeline, and investment planning.

Roadmap

Your roadmap provides perspective over time. It depicts what you intend to accomplish as you execute your strategy and complete milestones. You will want to either have an internal team or outside partnership (or a combination of both) that is able to plan and execute the projects necessary to achieve those milestones. Whether you are just getting started with an MVP solution or are continually innovating on an existing one, your roadmap will direct the way.

The process:

  1. Define Projects / Products
  2. Specify Milestones
  3. Identify / Specify KPIs
  4. Define Solution Scope

 

Defining an Evolving eCommerce Business

One of the most challenging aspects of launching a new eCommerce business is determining what to include in the initial MVP launch and what to hold back for future phases. These are difficult decisions to make and are heavily influenced by the impact they have on the timeline and investment required to build and launch your initial eCommerce business channel.

To facilitate this conversation, produce process flows and story narratives for collaborative discussion. When Echidna creates these for clients we include all desired features, functions, and stories captured in their Requirements Backlog and prioritized for inclusion in either the initial construction phase of the eCommerce solution or in subsequent design and construction phases on the roadmap.

Do you need guidance with your eCommerce strategy and roadmap? Contact Us

Execution

The execution of your roadmap represents the activities and effort it requires to get from one milestone to the next on your journey to maturity and strategic success. How you execute will determine how efficiently and effectively you achieve those milestones.

Poor execution can hinder progress or result in costly resources being lost to misaligned efforts. Echidna helps clients to establish a methodology to continually align and assess tactical efforts and improve results.

The process:

  1. Plan for Execution
  2. Build Solutions
  3. Introduce Change
  4. Achieve Results

Learn how we helped Jessup Manufacturing with their eCommerce strategy and execution to launch their new digital business platform.

Read The Case Study

eCommerce Strategy and Execution Expertise

We believe that your success is our success. Whether we serve to help shape your strategic vision, design delightful experiences for your customers, or implement the technology you need to make it all work together, we dedicate ourselves to knowing your business and designing the modern commerce engine that will power its next phase of growth and innovation.

If you have questions on this article or would like more information on our strategy and execution services please contact us to start a conversation.

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