Setting strategic-level goals for ecommerce

Admin on 19/05/2016

Setting goals is essential for an ecommerce business, and of course they should be SMART goals, but I’m also interested in how the goals can be meaningfully aligned to the strategic priorities of the business and be balanced across all the activities of the business. I think the strategic priorities and strategic goals should be developed together rather than one coming from the other, and should have both quantitative and qualitative measures.

 Internal-looking GoalExternal-facing Goal
Quantitative measure X
Qualitative measure  

Let’s take ‘Increasing revenue’ as a goal, as making more money is probably a pretty good goal for most ecommerce businesses to have. It would be an external-facing goal that is measured quantitatively, so it would go in the top right box above.

If all of the business goals fit in this box then I would suggest that the business doesn’t have a balanced approach to a) setting goals, and b) growing the business as a whole. Having a broader set of strategic goals that are spread across all four boxes would better represent the business as a whole.

Understanding Ecommerce Profitability

Admin on 07/04/2016

Revenue from sales minus Refunds, minus VAT on remaining sales revenue minus Product Costs minus Fixed Business Costs (Ex. VAT) minus Flexible Business Costs (Ex. VAT) equals Profit. Profit / Revenue = Profitability %

Building an ecommerce team: Start with generalists or specialists?

Admin on 23/03/2016

How should you go about building a new ecommerce team for an existing business?

With extra capacity required across the business in marketing, merchandising and product lifecycle management, development projects, and business processes, how do you decide on the best approach for building a lean but effective team?

Do you start with a generalist who can do a bit of all, or a specialist to take over one aspect more completely?