This business plan is written for a retail company that is going to build an ecommerce website to sell clothing products. This website should be mobile responsive such that the customers of the company should be able to review products and make purchases through the use of their mobiles. The report includes details of development of experience for the customer, system architecture of the website, software applications that would be used for the development and the security considerations of the same (Pandya and Dholakia, 2005).
The organization is a small retailer for clothing which takes supplies of clothes from the local suppliers and sells them to the customers in the offline and online space. The current sales of the company is happening through a boutique and social media platforms like Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups. The company is planning to build an ecommerce store. Value proposition of the company is to provide low cost clothing products of good quality directly taken from manufacturers to reach to customers with wide and new variety of latest designs. Primary objectives of the website is to provide apparels with latest designs at good prices and a good buying experience (Brohi et al., 2016).
The website would work on the business to customer model such that the products posted online would be purchased by the end consumers directly and once ordered; the supplier would directly dispatch the goods to the customers place. At the back end the company would be connected to the suppliers who would be listing their products online against which the retail would deduct a margin from the product price at the time of purchase such that the margin amount gets deposited in the company’s account while remaining amount is transferred to the supplier.
With the use of more and more advanced technologies, the demands from the supply chain system is also increasing and the customers are expecting better levels of services than ever before while keeping the costs low at the same time. However, this can add pressure to the retail organization who has to establish a balance between a good quality of products, effective services and low prices of merchandize that is going to be sold online. Providing services and generating profits can be conflicting situations and have to be well balanced by a retailer.
On a clothing retail website, customers order products of different colour, size, material, design, and prices but before doing that they need to go through a long process of search in which the customer needs to be engaged so that he or she does not leave the website without adding any items to the cart. Even after adding items to track, the customer can decide to not make a purchase and leave the website, in which case, the company would have a reminder feature that would allow sending of automatic emails to the users who have added products in the cart but have not purchases. This would push the customers towards completing the buying process on the website.
There can also be returns from the customers which would add to the cost to the company if handled by the organization itself which would be the case with the retailer. While the total cost of the return would be borne by the supplier, the company would still have to arrange for a person to collect the return material and this person has to be supported by an administrative staff to initiate refund. To remain efficient in this process, the company would need to reduce the cost of return order handling as much as possible. The website would thus give this provision by matching the return orders with the nearby orders placed by the customers so that the sales person who is responsible for getting the order back from the customer and also deliver one order in the nearby area can be used to complete both the tasks which would save both on the time and money. This would need a real time data integration on the website such that as soon as the return is initiated, the process of matching the other orders begin. The return orders an affect the profitability and thus, the website analytics would be used to understand the customer preferences so that it can be ensured that the return order are minimized. For this, the company would ensure to put the true image of the cloth as well as provide all necessary details like size, colour, style, and material information.
The company needs to also boost the efficiency of its ecommerce website if it has to get the best results from it. For this, the company needs to keep evaluating its efficiency and take steps for improvement. For the evaluation of the website, certain metrics can be used that would be used for reflecting upon website performance, usability, design, security, content updates, user transaction, and web technologies used. Website design, performance and traffic are the most important metrics that are used for evaluation of the website.
Design: Information, graphics, navigation, and user experience form th components of the design of a website. Website design can be assessed using a Web Analysis tool such as Maxamine that would assess the design of the website on the basis of factors like site architecture, page performance, page formatting, text elements, text formats, link formats, link elements, graphic elements, and graphics formats.
Performance: The performance of the website can be measured using response time of the website pages. At the time of peak load, the performance of the website can reduce as the website would have more load to handle and as a result the reponse time of the website would increase. If this response time is very long the customer would start to think that the page ins unresponsive and would leave the website. Thus, the page response time is very important factor of consideration when thinking of user experience. Page response time is affected by the page size and bandwidth between ISP and the end user. While bandwidth used by the customer cannot be controlled, the page size can be, Higher is the size of the page, longer would be the response time and thus, the website needs to have the optimization of the pages so that they are of smaller size when loaded.
Website Traffic: Traffic on the website is yet another important metric for the website performance. The study of traffic includes recording of unique visits, page hits, loyalty, and time spent. Page hits and unique visits are usually used for assessing the website traffic (cinca, et al., 2005).
A number of ways can be used through which the efficiency of the ecommerce website would be improved and these include the following:
Several stores would be taken to enhance the customer experience over the ecommerce portal so that more and more visitors are converted into paying customers or at least they spend a significant amount of time on the portal. These include:
Enhancement of search option: People who know what they are looking for usually use search bar directly to reach to the desired item on an ecommerce website. Others want to have filtering options to choose from so that they can drill down to their choice based on availability of options. Most of the people coming to the website could fall into this category and thus, to keep them engaged n the portal, the portal needs to offer some search filters for products listed online. The ecommerce website for the small fashion clothing retailer would have the following search filters on the website:
Easy Checkout Process: For making the checkout easy, the website would have the cart displayed through the master code that works on all the pages of the website so that it can be reached through any of the page by the customer. Once a person would click on the cart, the page would display products selected with some details like type of cloth, colour, and price, an option to select quantity, and buttons to apply a discount coupon, remove an item from the cart, and similar products to add to cart. On the side of the cart would be displayed the full amount to be paid, discount adjusted, taxes levied, and more.
Customer Support: The customer support would be provided through a direct chat feature that would allow the company representatives to respond to the customer queries fast in the real time. Client service would be provided through the chat which would be the first point of contact. The website would have a checkout page with email integration that would be used for confirmation to the customers about the order. The customers who would be registering on the website would be sent service emails but at the same time, they would be asked for permission to send them marketing emails which would be an integrated feature on the website. If a customer has a complaint or needs to return, the feature would be integrated with the account of the user through which the user can place the request or complaint and ticket would be raised against it that would reach the internal team to take action.
Social Media Integration: the social media sharing, liking and commenting feature would be integrated with the website through plugin such that any product or any page can be liked, commented on or shared by the users of the website on the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin Instagram, and more. The social media integration would allow the company to keep track of the incoming visits from the social media platform through the website analytics.
Client reviews: For every product , the website would have an option for the users to add reviews with selected star rating that would be posted on the product page. This would provide an opportunity to the customer to share experiences with the company or its product and would help company in getting good word of mount from customers who appreciate the products sold on the website. Many online customers today depend on the online reviews while taking decision on a purchase and thus, these reviews would give the website an opportunity to market specific products and help customers take decisions on their purchases. The company can also use these reviews to understand the level of satisfaction of the customers with specific products such that decisions can be made what items are selling more and thus, should be marketed more.
Educational website content: The website would have content that is useful for that customers in several such as exploring and understanding patterns and taking decisions on specific clothing to purchase based on their requirements. The website would have fashion blog articles detailing tips on choosing the right attire or understanding the quality of clothing products. This would engage the customers on the website as well as give the brand a boost as the customer would start to trust the company as experts who can provide guidance on the subject of fashion. This would encourage them to make purchases from the retailer online. The content posted on the website would be of high quality including the text the images that would provide visitors a visual aid for engagement. To make the content engaging, short explanations would be used and more of images would be uploaded.
Figure 1: WordPress Website Architecture
The picture above shows the architecture of the WordPress Website that would be developed for the online store. The platform contains different types of files in wwhich codes are written. These include:
Besides these files, the website would have some other pages that would be common for the whole website and these include index.php, page.php, single.php, cccategory.php, author.php, date.php, search.php, 404.php, sidebar.php, and footer.php. Besides these the website would contain may more pages based on the number of categories, menu items, and products listed. Each of the files would be accessed by the developer to create parts of pages and to add different functionalities to the website (Sharma, 2018).
Figure 2: WordPress System Architecture
At the back end , the architecture of the website would have a server and a database connected to the website. When a person would browse the internet and use the website URL to access a page on the website, a dynamic page request would go to the WordPress CMS which would connect to the server to retrieve the desired page requested by the visitor. The user would be able to access the website through browsers like Chrome, Explorer, Firefox and opera over mobile, tablet, personal computer, or laptop as shown in the architecture of the WordPress system above.
The website would be built using WordPress Content Management system as the base over which a variety of plugins would be used including:
Jetpack: jetpack is an analytics toolkit prepared for WordPress websites. It can be used for styling, securing and growing webpage traffic. It provide free website themes, content, and image tools. Other features like social sharing and connected content can be used for getting traffic on the website. Security can also be enhanced using this toolkit with the use of login protection feature that can protect the website from brute force attaches. Other advanced options include creation of back-up, spam protection, and SEO. For the current website, spam protection and SEO would be used with Jetpack installation.
Other plugins include DHSlides, Counter Statistic, WooCommerce, Products Plugin, Mojo Marketplace, Visual Composer, WP Security, Slider Revolution, BackUpBuddy, and WPLive Chat. DHSlides is a slideshow plugin that allows creation of slide show to be run on pages of the website containing images, texts, and buttons. Counter statistic would record the visits on the website and would show it on the page. On the front end would be limited details but at the backend, the administrative user of the website would be able to access a large number statistics related to visits. These include popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, came from links, visit length, visit paths, keyword activity, recent page load, return visits, ISP, browser, resolution, JS statistics, public stat, email reports, blocking cookie and location stat (Cullen, 2018).
Visual Composure is a kind of website builder tool that allows drag and drop features for website development. The developer would not need any coding skills to be able to use this composer plugin. It allows an instant update of the content that is added on any page using the composer and makes the user interface adaptable. The page elements created using Visual Composer can be copy pasted within pages. The UI UX feature of the plugin allows a user to also make changes through the use of a mobile device. It records all the recent colours thereby enhancing the look of the website. Besides this, there are multiple editing features such as frontend edit, inline editing, tree view, custom CSS, Custom JS, and recycle bin (Visual Composer Website Builder, 2018).
WooCommerce is an open source plugin that would be used for creating store on the ecommerce website. This tool can be used for selling products or services through the website pages. It includes features for managing inventory, managing shipping information, taking secure payments, and sorting taxes. It provide 100% control over the data both on the web and through mobile. It is both easy to install and easy to setup and carries some powerful features like unlimited product listing, customization of location, product reviews and ratings, shipping options, embed products at checkout, geo location detection, order management features like one click refund and guest checkout.
BackUpBuddy would be used to create the bacup of the complete website such that if the data is lost for any reason, the same can be retrived from this backup file. The backup content includes pages, posts, widgets, comments, theme files, plugin files, plugin settings, WordPress settings, theme settings, database, core files, users, media library, custom post types, images, videos, categories, and tags. The plugin would allow the website developer to set its website for regular scheduled backups that would begin backing up the website at specified intervals. The backup files is stored off-site using this plugin so that it remains safe. WordPress website can be restored from this backup directly using ImportBuddy (iThemes, 2018).
WPLive would be used for building the chat feature on the website which would allow the customer service representatives of the company to directly connect to the customers or visits of the website. It is easily customizable and provides a number of different extensions such as live chat support, pay to chat feature, mobile app,, desktop app, zapier integration, and SMS integration.
For managing the payment, the Woo Commerce application would be used which is a free WordPress plugin that can be used for selling products on line on an ecommerce website. As WordPress is chose to be used as the Content Management system for the website, the installation of WooCOmmerce would be easy and would only need the searching of its plugin on WordPress and one click installation of the same. The plugin is chosen for it can be easily integrated with any WordPress website, is very flexible for customization, provides a variety of payment options for users, and provides a high level of control to the webmaster.
WooCommerce is used by over 30% of the online stores that are created over WordPress. The plugin offers flexibility in terms of products that can be listed, configurations, instant download options, and affiliations. The plugin also provides some premium extensions such as subscription options, memberships, and digital discounts. The plugin would have PayPal payment gateway integrated with it (Mennecke and Strader, 2003)and would provide flexibility in delivery charges management through options like real time calculation, free shipping options, and flat rate shipping for products. Besides PayPal, the plugin also gives options to users to pay through other modes such as Bank Transfers through BANCS, Credit card payments, and cash on delivery. WooCommerce has 140 regional payment gateways integrated with it including Amazon Payments, Authorize.net, and Stripe.
Figure 3: WooCOmmerce Payment Interface (Shreve, et al., 2018)
The plugin has been developed keeping the needs of developers in mind and thus, provides a framework that can take care of needs from basic to advanced during development. The platform is built over REST API which allows integration with any third party service. Developers of the website would be able to create the store, modify it as well as scale it up based on the future needs of the store.
The users of the website can enter personal details while doing shopping on the website as well as enter confidential data related to their banks and payment accounts while transacting online. Through these modes, the website would capture a lot of private and confidential data that needs to be secured. Also, the files of the website can be at risk such that the hackers can compromise the website if proper security steps are not taken. Thus, security makes a major part of the development process (??? and Jaewook Lim, 2012).
To keep the website secure, the website developer would ensure to take the hosting services from an organization that has the security considerations and keeps updating security settings. TO be specific the website would be built using web space from the Hostgator.com. Hostgator provides strong security features such that if any of the files of the website gets corrupted, the website would be clocked from the view (Liang and Turban, 2011). The website owner can then get connected to Hostgator service team to delete the corrupted file and get the website up again. The SiteLock feature would be used for defending the website pages from hackers by using malware scans and firewall for the WordPress website. Besides this, following measures would be taken to enhance security of the website:
For managing the security of the website, WP security plugin would be installed on the website. WP Security is a security and firewall plugin that would add a firewall and extra security to the WordPress website of the retailer. The plugin would perform checks on website vulnerability and based on the analyses of the same would make recommendations for enhancing the security of the website. Developer using the plugin can set the security level of the firewall to low, medium or high based on which the rules would be set for securing the website. Different types of security that would be proved by this plugin (Goldstein and O’Connor, 2002) to the website include user account security, user login security, user registration security, database security, file system security, HT access security, blacklist functionality, firewall functionality, brute force login attack prevention, whois lookup, content spam security, security scanner, front end text copy protection, security features updates, and plugin support. The plugin also has some additional features that can be used for the protection of the website and these include:
Conclusions
This plan was developed for the establishment of an ecommerce portal for a small clothing retailer organization. The website would be built on the WordPress used as the Content Management platform and a number of plugins would be used to add functionalities on the website. The website would make use of Hostgator.com as the DNS and hosting service provider. The plugins suggested in the plan include Jetpack, DHSlides, Counter Statistic, WooCommerce, Products Plugin, Mojo Marketplace, Visual Composer, WP Security, Slider Revolution, and BackupBuddy. To maintain security of the website, a number of steps would be taken including complex password setting, installation of SiteLock feature, plugin updates installation, and secure FTP connections. The website would enhance the experience of the user on the website through implementation of number of features like easy checkout option, variety of filters on the search page, direct chat feature to connect with the service team, social media connection, and more. The report also explored how website can bring profitability to the organization and drive its performance. A number of measures could be taken to evaluate the performance of the website. Website design, performance and traffic are the most important metrics that are used for evaluation of the website. The performance of the website can be enhanced by taking several measures like easy check out integration, visitor engagement analytics on the website, integration of social media, and so on.
References
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