01 / 08 / 2018 Experts advices to success in e-CommerceHow to write your e-Commerce business plan Our e-Commerce experts give you the key to understand how to do a business plan for your e-Commerce project  1 -Define your project: 9 quick steps to structuring your e-Commerce project 2 - List your e-Commerce needs: how to create a site that converts and generates qualified traffic 3 - Estimate your marketing budget and your projected turnover Download the Business PlanIf you are reading this it’s no doubt because you have an e-Commerce project (site creation/migration, connection of your site to an ERP) and you have arrived at the stage where you require a business plan. This document allows you to visualise your requirements, and stay in control of costs related to the creation, maintenance and management of your e-Commerce site. Business plan definition - What is a business plan?A business plan is the written document that allows you to plan the creation of a project or a new activity. To do so, it is important to fill in a number of features on it. The goal is to present all the benefits and actions that your company will perform to sustain itself. It will show the expenses related to the accomplishment of the objectives and when they will be reached. Writing a business plan makes possible to present your project to potential investors or banks to apply for a loan and to attract more potential capital contributors. Here, our Oxatis experts give you insight into the thought processes required to write an effective business plan:
To answer these questions, download the free business plan template provided and follow the 3 practical steps outlined to develop your e-Commerce business plan:
1 - Define your project: 9 quick steps to structuring your e-Commerce project Prior to any formalisation of your project, you must study the competition, the market, your target(s), and so on. You must differentiate yourself via your product, your approach, your philosophy, your target, your catchment area, etc. To help you get your ideas structured, draw up your project with the Oxatis e-Commerce canvas, available for download:
Once this preliminary step is completed, you have all the requisite elements to present your project, define your offer, highlight your specialities, find your partners, know where to find your potential customers. etc. 2 - List your e-Commerce needs: how to create a site that converts and generates qualified traffic You now need a site that turns visitors into repeat buyers. For this, you must meet 3 requirements:
You will report the costs related to these 3 blocks in your balance sheet. 3 - Estimate your marketing budget and your projected turnoverWhy should you write a business plan? Simply put: to build your project, gain credibility, and crucially, to talk to banks. Your bank advisor will require a business plan from you to understand your project, so you must check that you will be able to repay the loan, but also to verify the seriousness of your approach. A business plan is essential if you want to open a business account, for example. A/ Developing a strong marketing strategy: finding the balance between a good conversion rate and traffic acquisition costsThe cost of creating and maintaining an e-Commerce site can take many forms. As mentioned in Part 2, in listing your needs you will be able to identify the partners and technological solutions to work with in line with your growth ambitions. As for the traffic, it always has a direct cost (SEM) or indirect (SEO, SMO). To accurately estimate and predict these costs, you need a concrete web marketing plan. This plan will give you the projected traffic volumes and turnover from your different sources (natural traffic, display network, text ads, affiliation etc.) and especially an estimate of your short- and medium-term ROI (Return On Investment) on each of these levers. You have to bear in mind that the most beautiful site in the world is of no use if it is not visited. You must therefore consider the number of visitors which will lie behind your revenue projection. We will therefore calculate together the turnover that you can generate the during the first year of your activity. B/ Establish a complete overview of your traffic sourcesYou have already studied the market, the competition and the target you are addressing, so you know where your future customers are. Now it's time to talk to them directly! Depending on your budget and your acquisition strategy, you will disseminate your messages or content more or less widely. You can estimate your budget once your levers have been selected:
C/ Estimate how much revenue you need to generate on your site Everything is a question of projections and business sector. Estimating your revenue is not an exact science, but an estimate of what you can achieve in a year by implementing a particular feature, or investing a specific budget in AdWords campaigns. Market research will help ensure that your short- and long- term forecasts are realistic and well-founded. How many sales will you be able to make in the first year of launching (or migrating) your site? To obtain this information you need to build an economic model based on tangible data. Be careful, every single line of your income statement should be justified. To estimate the turnover that your business can generate in the 1st year, you have to build your acquisition strategy right now, because that is how you will attract users to your site. This is the reason why the main levers have been explored a little earlier. A quick reminder about Google's billing principle: you pay when someone clicks on your ad based on a quality/bidding system: the more relevant the ad is to the user, the lower the click-to-click price will be and the clearer the announcement displayed. How can you calculate a monthly Google AdWords budget (the Google ad network)?Google AdWords is an ad network that displays ads or banner ads on Google or the Display Partner Network, which are targeted based on keywords that the user types, or based on users' browsing histories. 1/ Your monthly budget is £3,000 on Google AdWords campaigns * Google AdWords Conversion Rates: you need to consider the fact that conversion rates on Google AdWords optimise over time as your campaign settings change. Gradual selection of ads and keywords giving the best results allows on the one hand to improve the auction costs (average CPC) and on the other hand to identify which data converts the best. * Average CPC estimate: calculated based on Google data. The Google Ad Planner (now Google Display Planner) provides a CPC average to get a set of Google AdWords ad positions on the first page. Note: In launching campaigns the CPC is often more significant. We therefore simulated a cost optimisation of around 30% over 6 months. It is extremely important that you understand the importance - or rather the necessity - of finding the right people to advise you. To reduce the costs of your campaigns I recommend that you take the advice of experts. 2/ How much will your Google AdWords campaign cost you?- Trimester 1:
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Then you just need to take a macro view of your acquisition budget. To do so you should extend your budget to include the levers you have selected: Google Shopping, Google Display or Facebook, Instagram, Bing Ads, emailing campaigns or sms, depending on your target. If your budget allows you to benefit from the winning combination of organic SEO/paid SEO, then you should take that course as it will certainly pay off! Obtaining traffic is easy enough when you have the means but optimising your actions to improve conversions and ROI is another story, because the cost of traffic can absorb your profits rapidly. You will understand that there are risks of launching on the web without having notions in web marketing, or without being accompanied by specialised professionals. Now that you have obtained an estimate of the revenue you can generate through your site, you can now calculate the amount of your expenses.  D/ Calculate your chargesThe time has come to list the amount of expense you will have to dedicate to the project. You will find below some budget items which are fairly typical for starting a business: purchases, external charges, taxes, etc. You should complete information regarding costs related to the purchase of your stock - and all elements other than those concerning the management of your e-Commerce site - in the second part of the document that you have downloaded (see staff costs, depreciation and amortisation, taxes and fees). To answer the question “What are the costs related to the creation, maintenance, hosting, etc. of your e-Commerce site?” You will have to answer a second question: "SaaS or Open Source?” This is a good way to start listing e-Commerce partners with whom you want to collaborate. The budget items that you will have to delineate:
You have now calculated how much revenue you can generate. You have also calculated the total amount of expenses you will have to pay. All you have to do now is subtract one from the other! To conclude
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