Ecommerce Consultant / Project Manager

If you are looking to implement an e-commerce web site that fully integrates with your business system, you should ideally have a project manager / ecommerce consultant to manage the process and be a focal point of the project.

Here are a few things for a project manager to include in the specification document for a development company who is quoting - they are in no particular order:

• Can I see reference sites of it working
• How will it handle different shipping areas across the UK / Europe (eg the Islands, Northern Ireland, Remote Scotish mainland etc)
• Can it handle non ecommerce web information eg blogs, case studies, background information on products, industry standards etc
• Can the title tag be bespoke written and how does it handle meta keywords and description
• How effective is the fraud screening of the third party payment provider they integrate with
• Adding Google Analytics code at the bottom of each page
• Search engine friendly page names eg ecommerce-consultant.htm as opposed to the dynamic database driven query results
• Where is the location of the image - can it handle more than one size eg thumbnail, normal, large and high resolution (if required)
• If shipping overseas can two lots of weights be implemented - standard weight and volumetric weight and shipping based on different weights
• Can XML feeds be generated for Google Base and other comparison shopping engines such as shopzilla, shopping.com etc
• Does it integrate with Ebay
• Can a product be built by choices - eg a PC
• Generating a sitemap for Google
• Printable copy of page stylesheet
• Same product in multiple areas
• If you are despatching from various branches can the invoice / packing note be routed accordingly
• Previous customers can see their off line and on-line order history if they register an account
• Is it integrated with an affiliate programme eg tradedoubler
• Can customers print out their own invoices
• Can it handle bespoke 501 errors on the site

These are just some of the items your ecommerce consultant / project manager will include in a specification document which is final so the costs don't spiral. Of course they will also be a focal point to smooth things around your organisation - especially if you are retail and developing a distribution model through on-line - a completely different way of operating.

I could go on about business issues such as shipping and IBT's but this post is to give you a flavour of some of the things a system should be spec'd to do.

I undertook an element of this for a client on an 18 month project which successfully lanched a year ago and is now trading successfully on-line.

Further blogs will be posted outlining some of the above points in more detail and other things to consider as a business.