As in real life, to move from A (today) to B (tomorrow), you need a goal, a strategy and a plan.

First define your goal.

To do that, you could try to answer some important questions:

Where do you want to go ? What should your company look like in 5 years ? In 10 ? In 20 ? Who do you want to be ? What do you want to do in these years ? Should your company grow ? Should your revenues grow ? Do you want to secure or expand you market position ? What do you want to earn ? What do you want to offer to your customers ? To your employees ? To your partners ?

When the goal is clear, you define the strategy. The strategy will take you from the present situation A (today) to your goal B (tomorrow).

First look deep into the status quo.

Who is your customer ? How many are there ? How can you reach them ? Why would they buy online from you ? How can you complete the sales and what is the process ? What is your product ? Where do you get it ? Do you produce it yourself or who is your supplier ? How do you get paid ? How do you deliver ? What is your revenue ? How high are your costs ? What is your profit ?

Then you challenge your goal.

How realistic is it ? Where are the opportunities ? What are the risks ? Where are you today ? What has to be changed ? What has to be done ? Would you like to go for a single website, an online shop or a platform as Amazon or eBay, or social commerce in the social networks ? Single, multi- or omni-channel ? Where and how do you advertise ?

If you are the first mover of your industry, region or locality, it is up to you to decide. If you are in a competitive market with other participants, then they may be inspiring as they may already have overcome the initial challenges and can show you the best way to address the customers and satisfy their desires and needs.

I can help you to define the online strategy, create the concept for your various channels and realize the shops, apps, backends and interfaces, and train your teams.

Starting a shop from scratch is the beginning of an exciting adventure. You probably may have already an existing shop and are somehow online with an e-commerce solution or online sales channels as eBay or Amazon. In both cases, I can help you developing, optimizing and schaling your business,

target audiences

If you want to sell a product or a service online, you probably know already very well whom your customers could be and where to find them.

Let us first focus on who your customers are. Do you have local or regional target groups, demographic target groups, financial or profession target groups or target groups with specific interests, as for example sports or hobbies… This is telling you a lot about how to address them, how to interest them and how to capture their attention – potentially also how to make sure they stay and return. Finally, it may also tell how to influence their decisions. The ultimate goal is to engage into transactions so you get the deals and the customer so satisfied, that she returns soon.

Depending on your target audience we should design the shop. It is for them and for no one else.

Where to find your target audience and how to get them to your website or shop, is something I can take care of.

market analysis

To make sure your assumptions are correct it may be useful to look at other market participants and at your customers.

As a starting point for market analysis, I will define a list of keywords based on your information. Then I will search for these keywords and will obtain results covering all aspects of your market. Including but not limited to products, technologies, competitors, market size, growth rates, rankings and statistics, geographical hot-spots, the online- and social-media appearances, the social networks and more.

Based on these observations I will deduce and analyze commonalities and trends and suggest how to position your offering.

brand-strategy and brand experience

You probably have already a logo and a brand, and possibly a brand strategy as well.

The brand strategy should define how, where, from whom and to whom your brand should be represented. The brand strategy should determine what your product and your company stand for, what your goals are, what you offering is and transports on visual, physical, emotional, sensual cultural or intellectual level, why this is important to customers and beyond…

The brand is the common denominator beyond the product lines.

Or it may be a single mark for a specific product or product line.

It can be supported by the corporate identity and its clearly defined visual elements, in a way that your brand and your products will always be related to your company and highly recognizable by anyone.

In this I can help you in the finding of the name, the definition of the brand strategy, the design of the logos, websites, the web-shop and the documents used for corporate communications.

Your brand strategy could also include various aspects of your business as ethics and policies, that can be relevant to the online presentation and should be respected.

growth strategy

Depending on your current position and the market analysis if available, it is possible to define various path for growth scenarios, from stand-by, to moderate, to continuous, to progressive and ultimately aggressive.

Growth is not only an online thing. It may make sense to look at it from a cross-media and more general business development, marketing, and sales perspective.

I can challenge your position and help you to find the ideal path for your growth – at least I can contribute an external perspective to your growth challenges and give you recommendations based on my experiences and observations.

What I certainly can help with is to establish the objectives for your teams and help you discover the possibilities to support them by online strategies.

For example, if you want to enter a new geographical territory, it certainly makes sense to have a website available in the languages of that destination.

Or if you want to launch a new product or service, then this should be coordinated with media campaigns comprising advertisements and publications, and availability of touch points, so that the interested parties can access more information or directly order.

channels

Depending on your product or service you have different choices and preferences for the (sales-) channels to your customers.

First of all: the direct channel. It stands for the direct link of your customers with your company and includes all touch-points, as your website or shop, that they will visit to learn about your offerings and to buy from directly.

An indirect channel leads through agents or intermediaries, selling your products to certain target audiences, for example in certain markets or under certain conditions. In this setting, the customers do frequently not have any direct contact to your company.

You further may have different whole-sellers or OEMs, who rebrand your product and sell it under their own brands.

Further you may have agencies, pushing your offerings into their social media influencers or social media marketing campaigns.

For each channel you may have similar but different requirements to fulfill, to make them successful. This can be in terms of information, conditions, pricings, discounts, warranties, etc…

So, the sooner you have a clear picture of your channels, the easier it will be to for example to define requirements for product data, visuals, manuals and documentation, product categories, price categories, customer categories, customer streams, product streams, etc… to maximize the chances for success of all parties involved.

And the better I can design your shop and website to address exactly what your target audiences are expecting. And, on top of their expectations, provide the extra, you may want to provide as well to differentiate your offering from your market-competitors.

cross-channels

Cross channel is to be considered especially if you have different target audiences, or if you know, your audience is active on different channels.

If on one channel you send a message, then this message has to be in line with your messages on other channels, if sent at the same time (of a campaign for example), and it should not contradict previous messages, and all need to be realized by your offering.

Ideally you should either have complementary claims focused on the specific audience in the various channels you address, or one claim, you use on all channels.

Different channels may also be required to obtain a real impact. Especially for goods that are addressing kids or youngsters, but require parents approvals. In such cases, for example, the social advertising is starting first with clear focus on the younger audiences, for example with subject-dedicated influencers, and then followed by a printed advertisement in newspapers or on tv for the parents.

Of course, I welcome the use of other resources as well, internal and external, for performing the strategy and the analysis and am happy to base my work on their results.

Maybe you have already accomplished this exercise.

In such case, I just need as much information as possible.

Cross channel is to be considered especially if you have different audiences, or if you know, your audience is active on different channels.

If on one channel you send a message, then this message has to be in line with your messages on other channels, if sent at the same time (of a campaign for example), and it should not contradict previous messages, and all need to be realized by your offering.

Ideally you should either have complementary claims focused on the specific audience in the various channels you address, or one claim, you use on all channels.

Different channels may also be required to obtain a real impact. Especially for goods that are addressing kids or youngsters, but require parents approvals. In such cases, for example, the social advertising is starting first with clear focus on the younger audiences, for example with subject-dedicated influencers, and then followed by a printed advertisement in newspapers or on tv for the parents.

Of course, I welcome the use of other resources as well, internal and external, for performing the strategy and the analysis and am happy to base my work on their results.

Maybe you have already accomplished this exercise.

In such case, I just need as much information as possible.

AI

Artificial intelligence is a new field of e-commerce and so a new field for me.

Even though it is an old companion, as during my studies some decades ago, I was intrigued by Prolog and Lisp programming – the then favored technologies for what was called “artificial intelligence” at the time.

A couple of years ago, I built my own first simple machine learning program to acquire the basic knowledge and understanding. But with the upcoming generative AI, large language and large action models (LLM and LAM), it has evolved a long way since.

In e-commerce, AI is increasingly interesting for content creation as product description and story-telling, product images and -videos.

As mentioned above, it is also increasingly used to analyze the collected data.

online marketing

Online marketing is a very important part of every marketing strategy.

Marketing in general includes all market related activities and actually is essential to your overall success. The goal is to address customers and incite them to buy your products and services.

Online marketing is focusing on market related activities, happening and executable online.

So, this is first about addressing customers. Where do you think your customers are online ? This is where you need to go to find them.

In recent years the shift of touchpoints evolved from search engines first into affiliate networks and now social networks. So, you need to create a strategy that addresses your target audiences in their preferred channels.

Online and social marketing campaigns are the perfect way for this. They cover ads and channels used to spread them, a timeline to coordinate all these activities and return channels as well as tools to measure the impact of the campaign.

content strategy

Content is another important aspect of every online presence, as it may be a way to differentiate you from the competition. Content is everything that is not product or service data.

It comprises the imagery you use, the colors and styles, to create a look&feel and an stylish appearance.

It comprises of course as well all texts you offer to the audience to transport your messages and information.

It may be interactive or combined with video-contents and chat-agents.

The important success factor is that it is captivating the users attention, creating the desire to consume the information provided, required to acquire and win the trust of the user, and to awake his willingness to buy and secure his loyalty to return regularly to see your news.

social media

Social media is where the action is. This is where the communities happen and their interactions. Social media have an incredible potential as the communities spread information to scale in a blink of an eye.

This is also where the focus of attention is. Users, specially of the younger generations, spend up to 80% of the online time in their favorite social networks.

This offers you huge opportunities on different levels.

First, you can post yourself in social networks to build your own social community around your company and your products.

Second, you can use social networks of your visitor and customers to spread your offering to related contacts, of whom you can assume they may have similar needs and requirements.

Third, you can use social media advertising to spread your offer to a specific target audience.

Fourth, you can use social media influencers to address their communities with advertising messages for your brand.

Fifth, you can use social networks as test beds for certain product related inquiries and feedback.

advertising

Advertising is targeted at a specific customer group on a top-level, but more precisely can be targeted at individual level, “1:1”, as well.

As described above in online marketing, advertisements are part of the market related activities and one instrument to interact or enter into a customer journey. For example, you could place advertisements on a third party website, to address the users and possibly acquire them as customers on other websites, in social networks or in search engines, for example with targetted distribution of ads for specific target groups.

In this sense advertising is something representing you elsewhere in the web.

But in the same way, it can be interesting to offer some part of your web estate to others. The goals of this could be to generate additional revenues through affiliate networks or dedicated advertising partners.

Or you can advertise your own products on your websites or web-shops, to push specific promotions or stock sales.

Affiliate-networks are advertisement systems, aggregation ads from various advertisers and auctioning web-real-estate among those. These networks can be used to generate additional revenues. Unfortunately it is not always sure, what type of advertisements are provided. To make sure, the advertisements are in line with your customers interests I recommend using dedicated advertising partners.

I can help you integrate advertisements in your website and web-shops, to help maximize your revenues.

data strategy

The data strategy is mostly depending on what you want to do.

There are certain data that are unavoidable as they satisfy legal obligations, especially around the commercial processes.

Then there are technical data that are required to allow proper communication with partners, suppliers and affiliates. To avoid uncomfortable surprises, it is preferrable to understand the implications of how your data are shared or embedded with related parties systems as early as possible. Also, the data exchange should be as simple and straightforward as possible, to avoid price- and data-inconsistencies and other errors, availability or time related implications.

The user data are subject to privacy rules. There is a minimum of user data that are required for performing the transactions, messaging, payments, dispatch and the delivery.

Further data may be provided by the user after specific consent and agreement. These could be data that are used to define the user profile and preferences, so you can assist and support the user in their customer journey over a session or over your various touch points.

In the simplest cases, this would be the “wish-list”, the “basket”, the “products viewed” and the “products bought by others” lists, that can greatly speed the selection process.

But you can think of more strategic ways to use data. You can define offerings based on season, based on search engine key word rankings, based on user average trends, etc…

You may want to examine exact user behavior and reactions to specific offerings, as for example in A/B testing.

You may also want to use discount offerings, scarcity or dynamic pricing as possibilities to support or influence the buying decisions.

For all these aspects it is essential to define clear responsibilities and processes within your organization, and check and test procedures to secure and achieve these objectives.

Finally, you will have to decide what data to collect, and what you want to analyze. I can provide the tools for that.

tracking & analytics strategy

Tracking is part of the data collection referred to above. It clearly requires the consent of the user.

If the user concedes to be tracked, then every click, every mouse-move and every key- press can be logged and times spent, conversions, and breaks or page-exits as well.

This allows to give exact data for user experience analysis, that may also be used at the level of the user, for establishing a user profile.

At the level of user trends, consolidating and averaging of these user profiles, analysis can be a powerful tool, if it results in reactions, interactions and corrections.

Shopware offers several analysis functions.

Analysis however is first backward-looking, as based on historical data. The question is if trends for the future can be derived of it. And in addition, depending on the size of your company, totally different influence-factors may be applicable, compared to the sector average…

And AI is promising further analytic capabilities.