E-commerce is never done. During the construction of your new store and while running it as well, many new ideas will pop up. If you don't prioritize and log those, your store may suffer as things get forgotten and less important tasks get executed before urgent ones. That's why planning for the future is important.
- Creating a living document: You will probably not have everything you want in your store when you go live. That's why it's a good idea to have a plan for further developments on your website. The easiest way to do that is by simply keeping a list of any desired modifications to your store. This only works if you keep a living document! This means that if you encounter new wishes, these should be added to the document, and if anything in the list becomes redundant, it should be removed.
- Deciding on what factors to keep track of: An example list will be provided in a later step. We will keep track of five aspects:
- Functionality: The feature or modification that is desired.
- Department: This specifies which area of your business will improve because of the functionality.
- Benefit: The benefit you expect from this feature, indicated by plus signs. A benefit can either be in efficiency or in revenue earned. In our example, features giving a moderate benefit get a plus one, and features with a high expected benefit get two pluses.
- Risk: The risk of developing and implementing the new feature, also indicated by plus signs. More pluses means more the risk. Some things can be risky because of reasons such as them having a lot of impact in your current business processes, or because they mean you have to venture into new market territory.
- Delivery time: The expected time needed to fully develop the feature.
Keeping track of the department that benefits from the feature is useful when your list grows and your company does as well. For example, if you notice your customer service is getting swamped, you can filter the wishlist for all features that benefit the customer service department, so that you can quickly decide what to implement to lessen the burden there.
If you want to keep track of the category a feature belongs to, we recommend that you keep broad categories to help you choose. For instance, a feature such as "image zoom upon hover over product images" might be placed in a category called "design improvements" instead of something like "product page design improvements". By keeping categories broad, you ensure that your list remains manageable and you do not lose too much time deciding in which category a feature belongs.
- Creating the list: An example list based on the factors we listed in step 2 can be found in the following table:
Functionality
Needed for
Benefit
Risk
Delivery time
Integration with financial software
Financial administration
+
+
2 weeks
Different logo for Christmas season
Marketing
-
--
2 hours
Integration with warehouse management software
Conversion on site (faster deliveries), everybody dealing with order fulfillment
++
++
2 weeks
Landing page for new product
Marketing
+
--
2 days
Of course you can always expand the list with more columns if needed. However, in our experience having many columns does make maintaining the list take a long time, and as a result the list will quickly collect dust. If nothing else, it's better to remove any columns you don't need. Microsoft Excel or a Google Docs spreadsheet are good ways to create the list.
- Deciding on which functionality to give priority: Based on the example list we provided, we can conclude that building a landing page for a new product has good expected benefits, low risk, and a quick delivery time. As such, it would be one of the first things to tackle. Every time some collection of features for your store is finished and pushed to live, take a look at the list again and determine what to build next. Always keep adding feature wishes and remove wishes that are either done or irrelevant.
Without any doubt, you already have multiple ideas for your store. Start by writing them out in a simple list, and then decide how to prioritize them. Try to give an honest appraisal about the effort required to implement each idea as well!