This post is a recap of today’s webinar Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to eCommerce Project Succes, presented by Bernardine Wu of FitForCommerce, dubbed the “eHarmony of eCommerce.” FitForCommerce is a consultancy founded to help online businesses work through ecommerce strategy, requirements/RFP, vendor selection, ecommerce marketing and implementation coaching.

FitForCommerce has also recently launched FitBase, the first ecommerce market knowledge base and community. Bernardine is offering friends of Elastic Path (that’s you) a 10% discount off your FitBase subscription using the promo code EPWEB10.

Why Requirements Diligence?

If you were choosing a stock or career, you’d do your homework, right? Ditto for ecommerce.

No one will argue the better you plan, the better your build, test, launch and support phases will go. And planning is really an equation of Requirements + Use Cases + Workflow + Creative Design + Timeline:

Ten Steps to Requirements Success

1. Align with Business Objectives
2. Know Relevant Best Practices
3. Perform Competitive Analysis
4. Define Functional Requirements in Detail
5. Prioritize and Time Phase Requirements
6. Document Use Cases
7. Diagram Workflow Design
8. Apply Creative Design
9. Test and Adjust Requirements Again and Again
10. Keep Requirements Updated Always

1. Align with Business Objectives

• Define success. Spell out your desired, measurable objectives.
• Reinforce brand? Improve customer experience?
• Reduce costs? Increase profit margins? Increase conversion rates? Increase sales?
• Gain market share? Gain back market share?

• Know and agree (amongst stakeholders) why are you changing/re-designing/re-platforming
• Current site is out-dated? Inflexible? Needs better features or customer experience?
• New branding / imaging / product line strategy?
• Adding new businesses or product lines? Going global?

Specifying why you’re actually making these changes is important in knowing what’s going to drive these requirements.

• Define who are you designing it for
• Who are your customers and what do they want?
• Why do they come back?
• Are there different messages for different audiences? Primary and secondary?

• Align your organization to support the objectives
• Who are the stake-holders vs. decision-makers?
• Who is going to do the work? Who is going to review the work?
• Do you have enough of the right expertise or resources in-house?
• Right expertise: Technical, e-marketing, e-merchandising, creative design, IA/content design, customer support, fulfillment, etc.
• Are external or on-demand resources available?
• Have you allocated enough time? Are there conflicting projects or objectives?

• Assign and allocate the project team
• Is everyone clear on roles and responsibilities, time commitments?
• Who is the project lead and do they have the right authority and accountability?
• Do you need to look outside your organization to fill resource gaps? (We don’t always have all the talent/resources in-house).

Don’t forget to “document it and socialize it.” Write things down and document what you agree upon, so that everyone clearly understands expectations and deliverables.

Socializing needs to happen to get buy in from folks that have to live with it, implement it or use it. Have more discussions about it, circulate a memo/diagram, do an in-house training/webinar on it, etc.

Document and socialize each step!

2. Know Relevant Best Practices

• Research “Best Practices” at the feature/function level
• Research the industry
• Network with peers to find out what worked and didn’t work for them
• Reach out to experts in the field including consultants and providers
• Read whitepapers, research reports, forums, blogs
• Be careful of analysis paralysis

• “Play” with other great sites
• Shop competitor (same products OR same demographic target) and non-competitor sites
• Experiment with leading edge and non-leading edge features

Don’t just do things because they’re cool or other people are using them.

• Use quantifiable market data and benchmark as much as you can
• FitBase
• E-tailing Group

3. Perform Competitive Analysis

• Conduct competitive analysis
• See what you like and don’t like
• Decide what you want to include and want to avoid
• Check competition in your category, but also mindshare or budget competition
• Think about what’s needed to give you a competitive edge – short-term and long-term

Budget competition: in this economy, you’re not just competing against industry competitors, but against other goods and services the customer is considering. For example, apparel is competing with electronics, in a way.

• Compare specific features to non-competitors, too, to understand what your customers expect
• What sites and features are setting a new bar?
• What capabilities or interactions are your customers being trained to expect?

• Compare use of key features

4. Define Functional Requirements in Detail

Make sure you’re covering all your bases…

• Review each and every potential feature/function
• There are 100s of features, functions, topics that an eCommerce manager must plan and execute around

• Consider requirements’ impact on all elements of running an eCommerce business including content management, promotions, back-end processing, analytics, reporting etc.

• Use surveys, feedback forms (from customers and other retailers, if possible)

• Treat everything like an investment decision

• Document your current capabilities
• Pinpoint what features or areas of the site or content drive sales (or, conversely, trigger abandonment or service calls)
• Don’t assume they are obvious
• Review every page, data set, content
• Never assume your new site will have all the features and functionality you currently have, unless you plan or confirm that it will

• Limitations or Impact Factors
• Technical processes or limitations, such as integrations with legacy systems
• Budget considerations
• Organizational considerations, such as strong/weak skills

Metrics documents are good to have, it’s something you can hand to your vendor or in-house team that logs your average site traffic, peak times, etc. because you have to plan business processes around these factors.

5. Prioritize and Time Phase Requirements

• Prioritization
• Know that you can’t always get what you want when you want it
• Rate them
• Must Have = Cannot re-launch without it / Is a critical capability
• Should Have = Should not launch without it / Is important
• Nice to Have = Can launch without it / Try to include / Can be phased in
• Stack rank requirements – top 40 in order

Ranking things always forces people to put things in order, whereas rating them is less clear. If you can’t stack-rank, at least put them into blocks (most important 10, next important 10 etc).

• Phasing
• And when do you need it by?
• What are your timelines? What drives your timelines?
• Is project phasing an option? Is some throw-away work acceptable?

Case Study: Spencer’s Gifts

Must Have:

• Content management system: promotion flexibility, template changes, manage graphics, shipping options
• Merchandising tools - categories
• Auto merchandising
• Navigation/taxonomy
• Site search integration
• SEO – unique meta/title tags
• Analytics integration and page tagging
• Cart/checkout functionality– persistent cart
• Loyalty Program
• Integrate with order management
• Parent/child sku relationships
• Security and PCI compliance

Should Have:

• Personalized product recommendations
• Product ratings and reviews
• Dynamic imaging (zoom, alternate views)
• AJAX capable
• Site optimization, A/B and Multivariate Testing

Nice to Have:

• Alternate payments
• Improved content
• Wish list, gift registry, gift guides
• Product comparison
• Micro sites
• Mobile
• International
• Blog

6. Document Use Cases

• Uses Cases are written to clarify a specific customer experience/journey (written from user perspective - both customer and staff)
• Multiple features can be included in a single Use Case
• For each Use Case, include:
• Objective
• Scope
• Requirements
• Process & Feature Dependencies
• Data Dependencies
• Demonstration Scenario
• Alternatives
• Integrations
• Technical Assessment & Options
• Special Requirements
• Risks, Issues, Constraints

7. Diagram Workflows

• Functional Component Diagram
• Diagram that shows functional view of the eCommerce business to show inter-relation and implications to process, organization, technology, but not workflow

• Technical Component Diagram
• Diagram that shows technical integrations and data flow between systems detailing inputs and outputs

• Site Workflows as more than a site map
• Pages are to be used (how to get from home page to product page to cart to confirmation, for example)
• Features/content by page
• Storyboarding, IA, labeling, navigation
• Key workflows like: Browse, search, guided navigation, registration, checkout

8. Apply Creative Design

• “Lo-Fi” vs “Hi-Fi” Wireframes
• Lo-Fi covers layout – what is on a page (think inventory), relative size and position
• Hi-Fi is where everything is to scale

Lo-Fi Wireframe:

Hi-Fi Wireframe:

• Creative Design
• The look and feel of the site including colors, design devices
• Create multiple options to demonstrate a “design system”

• Use Corporate Identity and Style Guide
• If none exists, create one first, then adjust, then update it

• Usability
• Ensuring a visitor/customer’s experience is as effortless as possible

9. Test and Adjust Requirements…again and again

• Test requirements against all use cases including “edge cases”
• Test for wrong-course path. What should happen when errors are made?

• Field Testing
• User/usability testing of wireframes (start with mockups)
• Ask ‘friendlies’ (customers) to give feedback
• Get structured feedback of creative design, but go beyond “I like/don’t like” to “This works for me because…”

• Adjust Requirements
• When testing or other factors prove a need to adjust
• Be careful not to react too quickly to feedback (often one user comes in and hates something or gets stuck somewhere, look for patterns, consistency)

10. Keep Requirements Updated…always

• Keep a library of requirements documents
• Print a binder to maintain most recent version
• Maintain version control (label documents with versions and authors)

• Create a process to update requirements when anything changes
• Hard to do when focus is testing and going live
• Testing Team and Requirements Team must be in sync
• Make last step of testing (e.g. closing a ticket) include checking that requirements were updated

Requirements are never set in stone, they’re always living and breathing.

Questions

From my experience in ecommerce implementations, your requirements approach is right on. However, the problems is some clients (usually smaller ones) are not sophisticated, patient or detail oriented enough to take this type of rigorous approach. They are not able to articulate requirements without seeing it first. How do you suggest one adapt the methodology to meet this type of client?

Hold the line on rigorous methodology. Start with mockups but they have to tie to requirements, even if people are visual. Use both (wireframe and workflow document and list of requirements). Doesn’t have to be a creative design, but a placeholder for where the feature will live.

Can you share your experiences with delivering ecommerce sites using an agile approach as opposed to getting all requirements up front?

Agile approaches are tricky, if done properly it will work very well. If not done well, it can be worse than a waterfall approach. Defining functional requirements in great detail is still very important. The difference with Agile is that you’re doing things in chunks. Define your iterations (chunks), so that you can define those requirements.
Once you create those requirements for that iteration, they’re fixed. To fix them, they do need to be detailed enough. In a way, it’s taking this approach and breaking them into iterations.

What role does SKU descriptive copy play in the equation? It seems that retailers treat it as an afterthought.

Yes, very often that becomes an afterthought. As you’re going through your requirements, make sure you’re collecting samples of whatever that feature is about. Is it about copy, other product content, ratings and reviews etc. What does the retailer do now and what does it want to do in the future. That way it becomes something you’re planning for, rather than an afterthought.

What do I do if I’m already in the implementation phase, but I realize that my requirements weren’t detailed enough?

That’s a common question - and painful. There’s no right answer other than going back and re-cast your requirements. It will save you time to do this, even if it does mean a delay in implementation. You don’t have to start all over again, but it might take you longer to finish.

You may even find interdependencies pop up that you didn’t think about before, and you can take advantage of adjustments that need to be made to these requirements at the same time. Better to find out before you’re even deeper into the project.

Next Webinar

Creating relevant shopping experiences through targeted selling
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

Do you show the same offer to all your shoppers? If so, you’re falling behind your competition and failing to recognize that not all customers are created alike. Today’s top online retailers understand that they can micro market to specific segments of their customer base with targeted content. These retailers are maximizing their marketing and merchandising efforts, delivering a more relevant experience to the customer, and improving their bottom line.

In this one-hour webinar, Ecommerce Analyst Linda Bustos and Product Manager Peter Sheldon of Elastic Path Software will discuss how targeted selling presents an opportunity for you to improve conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

Webinar takeaways:

• How can you leverage what you know about your customer to improve their shopping experience and increase store revenues?
• How are the top online retailers using targeted selling?
• How can you avoid the common mistakes?
• Understanding how to apply targeted selling for your customers?
• What does personalization really mean?

Presenters: Linda Bustos, ecommerce analyst, Elastic Path Software and Peter Sheldon, product manager, Elastic Path Software

Sign up today!

A common ecommerce mistake is choosing a software provider before working out your requirements thoroughly. This applies to any software - not just ecommerce platforms but CRM software, BI tools, ERP systems etc.

If you choose your delivery method before you have a clear understanding of what your site or system needs to do at launch and 3, 5, 10 years down the road (as best you can predict) you may find yourself boxed in to a solution that can’t do what you need it to, or facing a development timeline and cost that you didn’t bargain for.

Last August, Bernardine Wu from FitForCommerce presented a webinar The Art and Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology and shared her tips for requirements gathering and prioritization:

• Define them at a detailed, feature-by-feature level
• Create use cases and user personas
• Include systems, data and processes your eCommerce system will integrate with
• Create workflow designs, screen mockups to show how your site will operate
• Include requirements for managing the site
• How products are loaded and manipulated
• How pages are changed
• How promotions are managed
• How orders are managed, fulfilled
• How customers are handled
• Prioritize your requirements
• Rank them in numerical order
• Rate them as nice-to-have and must-have
• Use ‘use cases’ to describe ‘how’ it should work

Be sure to include how the feature will work. For example, if the feature is a wishlist - can the list be emailed? Must you have an account to create a wishlist? Will there be product recommendations and low inventory alert emails sent to the wishlist creator?

And don’t forget you may dream up features that your customers don’t even want or need. Survey your customers and discover what they want from your site.

Because this is such an important topic, we’re bringing Bernardine back to elaborate on requirements diligence. In Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to Ecommerce Project Success you’ll learn:

• How to build a comprehensive requirements set
• How to incorporate workflow design and best practices into your requirements
• How to use benchmarking and market data to justify your requirements
• How to distinguish between a must-have vs. should-have vs. nice-to-have

We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, June 30 at 9am PST / 12pm EST for Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to Ecommerce Project Success.

In the meantime you can catch up on The Art and Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology (last summer’s webinar with Bernardine) and its companion blog post. If you’re still jonesing for requirements advice, check out my Coles Notes version of the 2008 Shop.org Annual Summit session Selecting the Right Solution Provider for Your Retail Operations: eCommerce Platform Selection Case-Study on the Shop.org Blog.

The following is a summary of Elastic Path’s webinar Multichannel 2.0: Are You Ready for the Next Generation of Commerce Channels? The webinar is also available for replay or download.

What is Multichannel 2.0?

Traditional, Multichannel 1.0 includes retail, mail order, call center and online store. Emerging technologies like mobile phones, Internet protocol TV and set-boxes, store kiosks and digital signage and consumer electronics like iPod touch, gaming consoles and portable book readers like Amazon kindle — the next generation of shopping channels is what we at Elastic Path refer to as Multichannel 2.0 — anything that has the potential potential to access your information assets and facilitate transactions through them.

Mobile

Mobile Commerce Beginnings

• First appeared in 1997 in Finland with 2 mobile phone enabled Coca Cola machines that accepted payment by SMS (text messages)
• The same year, Finland’s Merita Bank also began accepting SMS transactions
• In 1998, the first downloadable ringtones appeared in, again in Finland
• In 2000 we saw mobile parking payments in Norway, mobile train tickets in Austria and mobile airline tickets in Japan

Continue Reading:
Multichannel 2.0: Are You Ready for the Next Generation of Commerce Channels? »

This is a recap of Elastic Path Software’s April Webinar:Delivering Successful Enterprise Ecommerce Projects. (Click to view the replay or download the presentation on mp4).

Why did we choose this topic?

Economist Magazine rated the outlook of 15 industries from 1-5 based on their outlook for 2009, considering economic conditions. Only ecommerce had a sunny outlook, and it’s estimated that 1/4 of all retail transactions will occur online by 2012. This drive translates into a lot of ecommerce projects, with an estimated 20-33% of companies replatforming or upgrading their ecommerce solutions each year.

IT related projects 30-50% don’t make time spec and budget targets, ecommerce projects are particularly challenging. If we can take that risk down even 5 points for you, this hour-long webinar is time well spent.

Agenda

• How are eCommerce projects different from other I/T and Marketing projects?
• What business and project management elements are especially important in eCommerce projects?
• What technical elements predispose an ecommerce project for success?
• What are the Top 10 things to do before project kickoff?

Approach

Our approach was to collect experiential data from “hands on” project experiences (10 sample projects from 10 to 200 person-months). We wanted to keep this very close to the metal - so we started by looking at projects Elastic Path and HCL had done, and some that our staff had done prior. We also looked at industry stats, analyst and pundit opinions. Watching for common business and technical characteristics of projects at the high and low ends of success, we put together a Top 10 Checklist and practical tools to help you with your next ecommerce project.

How eCommerce Projects are different from other IT projects

• Relatively low cost with high business impact and ROI compared to other IT or marketing projects
• Visibility due to revenue and brand impact, if things don’t look right, it’s not just obvious to your IT staff - visible to competitors, executives, customers etc.
• Face direct competition from similar applications with peer companies
• Potentially very complex architecture
• Need to ensure scalability, security of transactions and data, fault tolerance aspects
• Need to integrate with specialized products and 3rd party sites/services
• Need to integrate with existing legacy systems
• Requires cross channel Support ( Web, Online, In Store etc)
• High rate of continuous evolution — “ecommerce is like constructing a ship while it’s at sea” due to continual innovation in the industry
• High production support requirements

Business and project management elements important in ecommerce projects

1. Commitment from organization leadership
2. Teamwork and effective, regular communication between business and IT teams
3. Requirements management during the complete project lifecycle - it’s not realistic to lock down requirements with an iron fist to ensure on-time delivery of the project
4. Effective change request management
5. Customer experience focus - when the user’s perspective is considered, success is much higher
6. Planning and management of integration dependencies between different sub-groups

Commitment From Leadership

Who are the executives responsible for the outcomes of the project? Often these are executives from IT, marketing, line of business executive and/or an executive with “Ecommerce” in their title. These executives need to be on the same page, not only behind closed doors but visibly to everyone on the project. They need to send the message of why this project matters to the business, and should do so explicitly and quantitatively. Ideally, project objectives should be translated into CR, AOV, Traffic and other ecommerce-specific goals. This will greatly help prioritize work if/when crunch time hits.

A helpful tool is a Project Charter — a brief document in bullet form that includes a message from the top regarding the project’s ecommerce goals. Anyone on the project should be looking at the Project Charter for an introduction to the most critical aspects of the project. It’s important to include a “message from the top,” signed by all the executives involved, laying out the objectives you want to meet.

Teamwork

Choose a team that ideally has worked together before, that won’t be at each other’s throats a week into the project. If you’ve got 10 soldiers in a trench, they’re not necessarily fighting for the general, they’re fighting for each other. Chemistry is important. You’re better off with a team with 100% chemistry and 80% skills than a team with 80% chemistry and 100% skills.

Invest the time and money to bring people together for fun, social activities. Fly in your outsourcing team. Bring in your end users. People have a lot harder time getting testy with someone they’ve gone bowling with than someone they’ve never met face to face.

Requirements Management / Customer Experience Focus

An IT organization would never think of deploying a new email system without involving end users, yet many neglect to involve customers or customer proxies in ecommerce project.

It’s helpful to have your BAs (Business Analysts) sit and watch marketing and CSR business users work with their current tools, or even train to do the job so they get a real gut-level feel for what user frustrations may be.

Consider an Agile methodology. Ecommerce involves a lot of non-IT savvy constituents and a very rapidly changing environment – it is very tough to get the requirements right the first time. Agile is a business and development methodology where the key is not to fix the scope and lock it down, rather start with list of requirements, then on an iteration basis (e.g. every 3 weeks) revisit priorities and establish the work plan for the next iteration.

What technical elements predispose an ecommerce project for success?

• Solution Architecture
• Store Front Design and Architecture
• Integration
• Security Considerations
• Third Party Solutions
• Search Engine Optimization

Solution Architecture

It’s required that the ecommerce solution addresses current and future business needs as cost-effectively as possible. Some tips:

• Use architecture and design patterns that separate back end activities from storefront for increased performance, flexibility, reusability and scalability.
• The architecture should not impose tradeoff between performance, scalability and the business controlled flexibility that the system provides
• Most of the business rules in the system should be business controlled rather than having IT dependency
• Design to ensure performance, availability and scalability of the solution based upon expected peak load and throughput requirements

Ecommerce also involves a lot of sensitive data transfers. Ensure the system runs with minimal security checks, with managed security across various levels.

Store Front Design & Information Architecture

Usability is key to the successful ecommerce site, many web users never return to a site after a bad experience. Design recommendations include:

• Content and data targeting to end-users should be business controlled rather than having IT dependency
• UI Should be intuitive, standard and easy to navigate
• Checkout process should be straightforward and not ask for too much information
• Site search should function properly, handle misspellings, synonyms etc.
• Privacy and security features should be emphasized to build trust
• Analytics tools should be used to measure the effectiveness of your store’s layout and features
• Personalization tools may be used for better user experience and higher average order values

When making design decisions, consider industry specific factors like your business brand identity, what is your industry, your target audience etc.

Integration

A typical ecommerce solution requires integration between several disparate applications and systems like ERP, CRM, search, analytics etc. Systems must be interconnected and seamlessly integrated to realize their full potential. When faced with legacy systems and existing code with a variety of languages, It’s important to establish interoperability, both syntactically and semantically. Any existing, loosely coupled services should be made available in the enterprise to address application requirements.

Integration techniques include data warehousing, web services (SOAP and REST), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Middleware which supports SOA implementation.

Top 10 Things to Do Before Project Kickoff

1. Form a cross functional core team

2. Define and communicate business-level goals

• Browser to buyer conversion rate
• Average order value
• Targeted traffic to the website
• Brand penetration generated by marketing
• Improved time to market
• Cost savings through more efficient order management
• Enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and trust

3. Decide whether to build, buy or leverage based on requirements and resources

Requirements

• Complexity (Catalog, B2B, B2C, support for multiple channels etc)
• Time to Market (Urgency)
• Uniqueness (In Business Model or Solution)
• Strategic Importance
• Data security
• Integration ( with internal and external systems)

Resources

• Technical capabilities
• ecommerce capabilities
• Budget

4. Technology decisions

• Implementation platform (Java/JEE or .NET)
• Application server, database server etc.
• Third party solutions and services
• Tie up with selected external third party vendors

Decisions should be based on your business requirements. How closely does the technology or product address the requirement? How difficult is it to integrate with existing systems?

Most large organizations have existing code written in a variety of languages, and have a number of legacy systems. It is vital that corporations be given an efficient, rapid path to preserve and reuse these investments. Legacy integration often is one of the most challenging tasks to overcome.

5. Solution architecture blueprinting

• Develop proof of concept / pilot to bring focus to key areas of concern and take decisions
• Perform capacity planning
• Hardware and software license procurement

6. Plan for data security and fraud prevention

• Involve data security team to comply with standards such as PCI

7. In-house implementation vs. outsourcing decision

In-House pros

• Gives full control over the project
• Knowledge Retention - Keep the talent and knowledge in-house, allowing for future enhancements, modifications and redesigns

In-House cons

• Limited Expertise - Internal team should have required level of expertise in the required technologies and products

8. Effective transition of business requirements from business to IT teams

• Continuous involvement of business during the complete project life cycle

9. Project planning and management

• Create detailed project plan
• Establish processes for communication, change control, and issue management
• Gather required engineering and project management tools
• Involve your cross functional teams
• Set up development and test environments
• Ensure availability of trained resources as per the project plan

10. Define roles and responsibilities of all the stake-holders and get their commitment

Tools Mentioned in Webinar*

Project charter
Agile software development life cycle
Wiki project index
Requirements traceability tool
Change request tracking tool

*Available with the webinar replay

Questions and Answers

What are the main reasons for ecommerce project failure?

• Missing alignment of organization functions toward the objective, concrete business, marketing and operational plans, should be available
• Missing strong leadership and clear decision making
• Improper handover of requirements from business to IT team, requirements not well understood by IT
• Having the right skill set and a commitment towards the goal essential
• Having integration points very well defined between internal and external systems is key so you don’t discover unknown problems during integration

What are some critical success factors when integrating your ecommerce site with social media sites such as Youtube, Facebook etc?

We see this in almost 100% of Elastic Path projects, people want to know how to leverage social media. The first thing you need to do before you start looking at the social media technologies is be clear about the customer experience — what are you and your customers trying to accomplish? Let the tools fill in capabilities that relates to your business goals.

That being said, there’s also room for experimentation, especially if your brand / strategy revolves around innovation.

Understand the tools in context to your goals. If it’s a complex purchase decision, maybe Twitter is not the right tool. Facebook could be the right choice if you have a strong community. Don’t think only about how to get people to buy stuff, you can also leverage them for customer research and awareness.

How difficult or easy is it to freeze requirements for an ecommerce project and why?

It depends on the relationship between the people doing the implementing and the end users. Does it translate to positive or negative energy? Because flux is the norm in ecommerce, everybody needs to agree it’s difficult and agree you will try to accommodate as much change as you can while committing to untouchable, must-do requirements. There’s a balance between iron fisted requirements management and anarchy.

In addition to capturing requirements correctly and communicating them between IT and business departments, using requirements stability tools can help you track requirements through the project without missing anything.

When evaluating vendors for ecommerce solutions, what are the top 3 things we should be looking for?

We do have a full webinar on that topic, check out The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Build, Buy or Leverage?

Certainly features and functionality should meet your requirements, but assuming your solution will be in place for 5 or 10 years, it’s very important you don’t paint yourself into a box by looking solely at today’s features and functionality. Look for flexibility - can you get skills quickly or are they all proprietary? Is the tool well architected so I can make extensions down the road?

Linda’s comment: Features, Functionality and Flexibility - the 3 Fs?

How important is it to understand target customer behavior before we think of designing an ecommerce solution, and how to proceed with that?

It’s very important to understand customer behavior and focus on success factors IT when designing the site, branding, site should represent the business plan. You should also understand your industry type and competitive environment.

In terms of how you proceed, one approach is to look at your web analytics tools and look for pages where people are dropping off. If you can organize a focus group and have them use your site and get into their heads, that’s also good. There are also other technologies using Javascript-tagging that can collect on-site user data including A/B split testing.

How Important is to involve testing team from delivering a “defect free ecommerce project” perspective?

Very important. You should involve a testing team from early on in the requirements process, using business cases and performing continuous testing through the integration phases. After integration you still need several rounds of testing end-to-end, taking all scenarios and business processes. Performance and load testing are also important to ensure you can support a large number of sessions at one time.

How best can you combine the efforts of a “brand” agency with a “technical” implementation team?

The first thing your question assumes is that they are a team! Creatives and IT folks sometimes live in different worlds. It’s important to get at least one or two of your creative people (Flash, Flex, AJAX or whatever the site is going to use) in the room to build rapport together. When technical people go back to say they can’t do it, you can have an intelligent, friendly discussion.

Both need a lingua franca that relates back to the customer experience and business outcomes, not designing for the sake of artistic merit but for business results.

Next Webinar

Multichannel 2.0: Are you ready for the next generation of commerce channels?

While the retail store, call center, print catalog and website (Multichannel 1.0) still play key parts in multichannel retail, a new generation of shopping channels is emerging. Advancements in mobile, interactive digital TV, and in-store digital signage (Multichannel 2.0) will change the face of shopping as we know it - and could even mean the death of POS systems, making commerce platforms even more important to retailers.

Play futurist with Elastic Path Ecommerce Analyst Linda Bustos and Product Manager Peter Sheldon and explore the emerging technologies of mobile, interactive digital TV, digital signage and other Internet-enabled devices. This one-hour webinar will cover the possibilities and challenges for both IT and marketing professionals:

* How are retailers and shoppers already using Multichannel 2.0?
* What are technology vendors building to enable Multichannel 2.0?
* What are the technological barriers and how can you bypass them?
* How will you prepare for the next wave of shopping channels?

Sign up to attend

Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Time: 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern
Presenters: Linda Bustos, ecommerce analyst, Elastic Path Software
& Peter Sheldon, product manager, Elastic Path Software

 

This post is a recap of today’s webinar: The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Buy, Build, or Leverage? presented by Michael Vax, CTO, Elastic Path Software.

Agenda

• Understanding what models are available
• Understanding your ecommerce needs
• Finding the right model for your enterprise

Understanding what models are available

Choose the Model:

Image Copyright ©2009 B2C Partners. All Rights Reserved. Selecting the Right eCommerce Software in Six Weeks or Less

• Custom - Enterprise Software (Buy or Build)
• Console - Software as a Service (Lease Technology)
• Crew - Full Service Providers (3rd Party End to End Solution)
• Catalyst - Small Business Solutions (Starters), less than $5Million in revenue online

Every new market starts from “Build”

• A small number of pioneers started to build ecommerce applications for their internal use
• Web services companies started to develop ecommerce functionality for their clients (shopping cart etc)
• Some started to productize their solution

At first choices were limited to Build vs. Buy decision. With the introduction of SaaS (software as a service) solutions, the decision became more complicated.

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Webinar Recap: The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Buy, Build, or Leverage? »