Welcome, this is Eugene, thank you for joining me. Let's talk about e commerce as retail reconfigures into brick and mortar, which is a business model that has both online and offline operations, and showrooming. This refers to the practice of visiting a store or stores in order to examine a product before you buy it online at a lower price. Businesses have to create experiences for the customers like never before. According to Shopify, the global ecommerce market will reach $4 trillion by 2020. positioning yourself to participate in this market is essential. But you need to start with a solid foundation.

You've probably picked up on it by now but I'm a big proponent of proper planning, in my opinion, and drawing on many years of experience, planning is crucial when it comes to operating A successful e commerce Web Store. There are many advantages and disadvantages as well as pros and cons. When it comes to opening an online store, I won't go into too much detail over here. If you've been with me this far in the class, I think that you are leaning towards the pros and the advantages side. But in an attempt to limit the risk, and the risk being pretty much not selling enough, there are a few basic principles and best practices that you should follow. In this class, we'll take a look at the 12 functional areas of e commerce that form the roadmap to launching a successful online business.

Let's run through them quickly. I developed this roadmap while working for a venture capital firm and it quickly became a crucial element in our due diligence process. The 12 functional areas of e commerce business plan, budget, ecommerce software, website design process. Then we move on to search engine optimization search Marketing, Merchandising, and distribution. Then we look at omni channel marketing, website analytics, behavioral targeting, and customer lifecycle management. Let's look at each area more closely.

And we'll start by defining a business plan. A business plan is a document setting out a business's future objectives and strategies for achieving them. A well thought out business plan describes the rationale of how an organization creates the levels and captures value. It's a written document describing the nature of the business, the sales and marketing strategy, the financial background, and containing your projected profit and loss statement. There are two types of business plans the Lean Startup plan and a traditional business plan. The Lean Startup plan was covered in detail in the project that accompanies this class.

Let's first look at some of the factors that go into a lean business plan. This will give you a one page business plan in Three minutes or less, and it covers the following areas. The problem your solution, your unique selling proposition, customer segments, channels, cost structures, revenue streams, key metrics and your unfair advantage and the traditional business plan. This is a continuation of your Lean Startup plan and as a lot more detailed, it is also usually required by finances and investments. It covers areas like an executive summary, your problem and solution, market conditions, competition, and then a marketing plan with a positioning statement and your unique selling proposition. It also usually includes the timeline, milestones, and a lot more about your team.

Let's move on to the budget. A well allocated ecommerce operating and marketing budget determines the balance between investing in new customer acquisition and retaining your existing customer base while providing the products and services required to run your business efficiently. Start by creating a budget in either Excel or another spreadsheet program. Usually you can budget between three and five years out, define your revenue model that takes into account your projected product sales, your projected returns, inventory costs, and that only include cost of goods sold and your margins, distribution and shipping expenses, fixed and variable selling expenses. And then those will include line items like marketing and salaries, wages and benefits. And then you also into DNA, which is your general and administrative expenses, as well as any financing expenses, things like debt repayment schedules, interest payable, and if that's applicable to you.

Your bottom line should end with your earnings before tax. In this dynamic world of online selling, you will need to readjust your budget often. When choosing an e commerce platform, there are several things to consider. The platform should incorporate all the aspects of creating and maintaining an e commerce website such as hosting to Design and good SEO integration. In addition, and I know this is common sense, but ensure that the software you choose offers the shopping cart capabilities of accepting a variety of payments. Finally, the shop software should provide top notch security such as fraud, protection and secure socket layering on SSL certificate for added protection and PCI compliance, to give the users the peace of mind that the personal information won't end up in the wrong hands.

Other things to consider the ability to scale and to handle large volumes of truck traffic as your business grows. moving platforms is expensive and extremely painful. flexibility to easily and rapidly create custom landing pages and to perform catalog updates using affordable internal resources rather than expensive agencies. Another thing to consider is a flexible platform with easy integrations into your back office system. As your CRM and your E RP software and external marketing providers. As your webstore grows, ideas will come fast and furious rapid appointments and quick rollouts of new product ideas and features are essential.

As a side note, you have to decide between software as a service, which is a SaaS business model, or a hosted solution. Shopify and Squarespace are examples of SAS models, and WordPress and Magento are hosted solutions. Some of the popular e commerce platforms in the US include WooCommerce, which is powered by WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, and then there's a number of other ones like Magento, bigcommerce, Volusion, Wix and the list goes on and on. new platforms are introduced constantly. Visual Communications on the World Wide Web is perhaps the most important form of good munication taking place when users are surfing the internet. When experiencing the web visit the visitors use their eyes as the primary sense.

And therefore the visual display of a website is so very important, especially for the user to understand and follow the communications that are taking place. Let's look at some of the elements that come into play your basic design principles that all graphic artists are familiar with things like logos and use the use of the correct color palettes, product photography. In my opinion, this is one of the most important factors to consider for an e commerce website. Remember, you are trying to recreate the in store experience online using photography. In addition to products like Adobe Photoshop, there are a number of affordable online photo editors available a program like Canva comes to mind. Let's look at search engine optimization.

As a quick recap, SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or online store for the search engines, also known as an organic ranking. Why is that important? Because the higher you rank in the search engines, the more traffic and potential customers will get directly to your store. It is important to get your SEO ecommerce strategy right from the very beginning, it is really hard to work backwards. SEO is divided into four main areas. You've got your technical factors, link building, content generation, and engagement.

If we look at number one, the technical factors it's good to follow the best practices that are out there. Most of the modern ecommerce platforms have the ability to be SEO friendly. In my opinion, content is the most important SEO factor these days and requires a lot of your attention. It gives you the ability to optimize your product detail pages for keywords and key phrases by crafting your product URLs, your product title and your product descriptions. Have tags to all your images and customize your SEO titles and your SEO descriptions. This is what searches will see when your page appears in a search engine result page, also known as a SERP.

I'll talk a lot more about optimizing for e commerce SEO in future classes. Search Engine Marketing or sem is the umbrella term used for all the methods to increase your store's visibility on the internet and is used to reach new and existing customers. popular online channels include email blogging, social media played search, affiliate programs, video automated marketing and marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy. Social media, I regularly get asked this question which social media platforms are the most popular and which should I concentrate on? In the US, Facebook and Instagram reigned supreme, but it's a close race depending on who you talk to. YouTube that's owned by Google is very popular.

And as I mentioned before, video is hot using the world's largest social media market. China is vastly different from its counterpart in the West. Yet the ingredients for the winning strategy are very similar. There's no Facebook, there's no Twitter, there's no YouTube. But for every site in the West, China has something similar yellow few examples. merchandising, merchandising, management has never been more important to the success of an online store than it is today.

Consequently, measurable performance results are now equally as important to merchandising management areas to pay particular attention to include manufacturing and sourcing, where you're getting your products from product and data management. And this includes things like pricing, inventory levels, the stocking levels, etc. product descriptions not only important for us SEO, but also as a usability factor on your product detail pages or PDP, product photography I've mentioned this before, it is crucial for creating great user experiences. Also the village visitor expect lifestyle photography on your blog and your social media outlets. Now let's take a look at distribution. This is where the rubber hits the road, all your efforts off or not.

If you don't get the right product to the right customer in the right amount of time. The name of the game is pick pack and ship for your distribution to be effective. Play close attention to the following speed. The goods must get there on time, every time accuracy. The goods must get paid but not just any goods. The exact goods pecker ordered scalability.

As you grow will your ability to fulfill orders grow with you. Search the holiday season and other occasions cause surges in shopping traffic. Work Christmas gifts be delivered on time. Third Party logistics. third party software and logistical services are now widely accessible. They can deliver with a high degree of accuracy, but also manage costs to the point where in house logistics becomes too expensive and sometimes unpractical.

If you do fulfill in house facility and workplace safety has to be taken into account. omni channel marketing can be achieved by creating a multi touch point experience, as we discussed earlier, that impacts your business development by adding value, branding, reinforcement, demand generation that drives sales and audience engagement to build customer loyalty. Popular channels include guerilla marketing, also known as word of mouth marketing, hosting workshops and webinars, visiting and exhibiting at trade shows, events and selling at markets. Don't lose sight of print advertising, radio advertising, as well as TV advertising and then Got public relations, press kits and press releases has tremendous value when it comes to spreading your message. data and analytics is what it's all about. And it gives us the ability to measure and analyze each step of the e commerce journey to ensure continuous improvement.

Tools available include some of the following. Many of them are free that I mentioned that I'm a big fan of Google tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, now known as Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and Google URL tag builder that you can use to tag links to see when people are coming to your site. Then you also get really good insights from your paid search channels like Google ads, Facebook, as well as being ads. You can even go one step further by using data visualization tools like Microsoft Power BI, tableau, or Domo. Behavioral targeting comprises of a range of technologies and techniques. used by online website brands, publishers and advertisers aimed at increasing the effectiveness of their marketing and advertising by using the user's stored web browsing behavior information, usually relying on cookies to accomplish this.

Yeah, some of the more common methods used by ecommerce stores, remarketing, website personalization, deal customization, email personalization, shopping cart abandonment, and website testing things like ad split testing and multivariate testing. customer lifecycle management, or CLM is an advanced framework for measuring customer metrics over time. As your ecommerce store matures, it will become evident what channels and measurements and which customer segments to pursue in order to build a sustainable revenue model. The goal is straightforward to reach the right customer at the right time with the right message. The next generation of e commerce leaders are seeking commerce solution that will support the following global and brand expansion. growing international sales is now a cost initiative for many online retailers, digitally connected consumers and the diversity of the consumer touchpoints is really important.

Integrated cross channel brand experiences, the majority of online retailers rank the need to support multi channel initiatives as very important. Business agility, the agility and speed at which you can deploy new features and integrate with emerging online services is paramount to provide a competitive edge and differentiation in the market. In this class, we covered a lot and congratulations for making it this far. In the next class, I will wrap up and set expectations for future classes. I really appreciate you coming Some time with me running an e commerce store can be fun and rewarding. I hope you can tell.

I really love this stuff. I know your time is valuable. And once again, I'd like to encourage you to reach out with questions, comments and suggestions. Please review this class and help out a fellow student. Zebra. Remember that See you in the next class.