Ecommerce Planning

Author: Pouya Eti

Planning is one of the most essential steps in any process which helps you to get to your destination. Sadly most people either skip this part or even don’t know about it. Planning is like an exact direction toward your goal.

Imagine you are in the street and want to get to your destination, if you don’t know the roads and don’t have a map, it can take forever for you to get there, in most cases, people never get to their destination. The plan is a map to your destination.
So it is precisely the same here, you must have a map for your life, your business, and all the other goals you have in your life. Without them, you will turn around yourself with getting nowhere.

Please do not skip this section and pay close attention, because planning is fundamental of success for any of your goals.

Planning elements

What you need to think about before creating a plan are:

The goal
Steps
Timeline

Then try to create a map for one of your goals. Think about all the steps, which one you need to do first. For some steps maybe you need to begin them all together.

A goal without a timeline is a wish. SO it is very important for you to have an idea that how long each step may take, 1 day? 1week? 1 month? The further you go the less detail you need about each step. So the next part is to add the timeline to each step. Remember you don’t need to be exactly sure, this is just an estimate.

Planning your goals

In this part, we will practice to set our goals and create a plan for it. So the first thing you must do is think about the goals you have in your mind and create a list the same as the example below:

I want to start my marketing agency
I want to drop 5 pounds
I want to read 30 minutes per day
I want to …

It is very important to remove the limits from your goals, go crazy, and write what you exactly want to have. If it is a million-dollar if it is a great life partner, anything you want without stopping yourself and saying, Nah, this is impossible, I can never get it.

As a practice, sit down, and think about your list, write down your goals on a piece of paper.

For the next step, write down approximately how much each goal may take one month or more.

Then think about the elements and steps you need to accomplish your goal. For example, if your goal is to visit a country, think about the items you need, like:

money
Off time from work
Maybe a visa

Then try to draw a diagram of the steps. So, first I’m going to save some money then I will apply for a visa, and also meanwhile I will not use off time from work so I can use all at once.

Ecom Planning

Till now, we have learned how to create a plan for any goals, and here we will mostly focus on creating a plan for creating or improving an eCommerce system.

You should know that the more you practice and the more you learn about eCommerce and marketing, the better you can create the plan.

The main steps are the same as before, which are:

Know the audience
Improve the product
Find the traffic
Drive the traffic to the funnels
Convert them into customers

When you want to improve an eCommerce system for a company, you need to analyze each and create the plan.

Now the hard part is to recognize where you need to drive the traffic according to the type of your product and business.

Ecom planning for product owner

If you are the product owner or you are working on an eCommerce system just for one company, you need to create the plan once, find the traffic sources, and then follow up on it. But remember that from time to time you need to analyze the sources and update the data inside your plan.

Ecom planning for Agency / Freelancers

If you are going to do eCommerce as an agency or freelancer then you need to repeat the same process over and over for each new product or company.

Ecom planning for Affiliates

If you are going to do eCommerce as an affiliate you need to select a main niche, attract the audience which are interested in that same topic and offer them different products only and only in that niche.