Eureka! I’ve got a great idea for an online business
June 3rd, 2009
Posted by Chris
Ian took a call recently. It was a man who wanted an e-commerce website. He wanted to know how much it would cost. Ian asked him why he wanted a site at all.
This flummoxed the man. He’d called a few design agencies, and none had asked him this. In fact, they hadn’t asked him much before giving him a figure.
“What’s your competition?” I heard Ian say. “Have you done a competitive analysis?”
I was feeling sorry for our potential client. I wanted to give him a figure, but Ian was right. An ecommerce site is a shop. Behind the shop is a business, and it’s the business that matters. How will it make money? Where will the customers come from? Where are they going currently? What will attract them to you? Why are you doing this? What are your values? How will people describe your business to each other?
Questions like these firm up the business idea, and only when the details are clear can we see how to make a design that works, let alone cost the final build.
You might say, “This sounds like a business plan”, and you’d be right. But it’s amazing how often business plans are bypassed when someone has an idea for an online business. The ‘e-commerce site’ is seen as a readymade money-making solution. The client wants an agency to configure the software and make it look pretty. The rest will look after itself.
But what they really need is help configuring their business and making the online experience work. Most new businesses fail, and we want our clients to be the exception. So forgive us if we ask you difficult questions — we’re only trying to help.
