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Planning an eCommerce Store

Written on April 22, 2020 at 4:16 pm

If you’re planning to set up an online store to sell products online, you can use the questions below as a checklist to work on your eCommerce business plan.

  1. How many products will you have?
  2. Will those products have variations, such as size or colour?
  3. Are the products physical or downloadable?
  4. If the products are physical, calculate the shipping costs for the weight and size of each product.
  5. Where will you be shipping to?
  6. What shipping methods will you offer?
  7. Will you have fixed shipping rates across the store, or different rates for each product?
  8. Calculate the cost of any shipping material such as boxes or bubble wrap and include that cost in your product pricing.
  9. Will your shop allow prices to be displayed in multiple currencies?
  10. Do you require custom fields for the products? (Example, monogrammed products would require a name field)
  11. Which payment processor will you use?
    1. Paypal
    2. Stripe
    3. Square
    4. Others?
  12. Will your products be organized by categories?
  13. Do you have product photographs? Do you need to hire a photographer?
  14. Do you have written product details such as dimensions, materials, and any other info that would be useful for customers.
  15. Will you allow for customer reviews?
  16. Will you use coupon codes?
  17. Who will be managing the shop once it’s set up? Will they require training?
  18. Will you include newsletter sign-up integration with your check-out process?
  19. Which eCommerce platform will you use? If your website is built with WordPress, WooCommerce is the best choice for an eCommerce site that integrates with your WordPress website.
  20. If you don’t already have an existing website, what other pages and content will you have on the website?

If you’re ready to get started, contact me with answers to the above questions for a custom estimate.  I build custom-designed eCommerce sites using WordPress and WooCommerce.