Business plan for ecommerce: start selling online driven by data

Where to start to make a really useful Business Plan for your e-commerce? Forget pages and pages of documents and think about the data-driven approach!

An ecommerce business plan defines and manages the various factors involved in launching an online store and growing it.

It is identified as a document that summarizes operational and financial objectives, cost estimates, and revenue forecasts. A real guide describing how an online store will achieve its business goals!

This is a critical step in launching an e-commercebusiness, but also in defining acompany‘s goals and future prospectsduring a difficult time.

In fact, making a Business Plan allows you to better understand what goals you can achieve and, especially if it is not your main business but you are opening a SIDE ecommerce, understand how much time and money you will have to invest before you can be up and running).

Also, if you are looking for investors, you need to figure out how much their earnings would be so that people are motivated in giving you a contribution. So a business plan is also extremely important here.

Beware, however, because entrepreneurs (and probably you too!) generally imagine the business plan as a verbose, meaty document that covers a whole series of very long chapters. Imagine that in business schools they teach that it takes months and months to write!

Fortunately, this is no longer the case.

Today it is essential that the business plan be much more streamlined, based on basic and clear elements . It is important that entrepreneurs and possible investors do not have to get lost in pages and pages but have a document that is understandable and really useful.

The ideal method? The Business Plan driven by the data intercepted, examined and organized during amarket analysis. A data driven business plan!

What is a data-driven business plan for e-commerce and what are the benefits of this approach?

A truly useful Business Plan for an e commerce company starts, first and foremost, with an analysis of the target market.

In fact, having real and accurate information about all aspects of the market in which the company is going to operate is crucial for assessing opportunities, risks and profits.

For this reason, it is critical that as a business owner who is planning to open/improve your online store, you contact amarket research agency so that they can intercept, process, categorize, and analyze whatever data becomes valid to draft a clear and effective Business Plan!

Specifically, if you want a good, understandable and useful business plan, you should choose us at Central Marketing Intelligence.

Modesty aside, we know how beneficial our data-driven approach can be for your ecommerce business, and we are well aware that we are the only agency in Italy to adopt it when it comes to Business Plans (and more!).

Using this method means being guided by data to make informed decisions. It means not risking basing your business on intuition but rather being sure that you have data in hand organized in a crystal-clear way… Getting them in a very short time!

Thanks to this approach, you will not have to wait months and months to receive a bundle of incomprehensible documents.

You will receive a well-organized, understandable report that you can use right away to achieve your Business goals.

Such data organization ensures you successful decision-making, planning, and risk management processes, as well as comprehensive and attainable goal setting.

What does an e-commerce business plan consist of?

A business plan dedicated to your online store is divided into the following basic parts:

• Problem you’re going to solve with your business and target market analysis, explicated with clear data showing how much a market is worth and that there is a potential for you to get in on the ground floor with your e-commerce.
• Your strategy to succeed in the target market, with targeted actions based on the market situation and based on the competition.
• Value Proposition (CVP): your value proposition, which you demonstrate you have realized given the market opportunities and considering the target customer (and their goals).
• Financial part, which depends on the costs of your solution, the opportunity (so how much you estimate market demand might be) and then the costs of the strategy you have adopted.

How to draft these elements and make them clear, grounded in real data and not intuition? By performing – flawlessly! – Amarket analysis, a study of target customers, and acompetitive analysis.

Let’s see how these basic steps for your business plan are broken down.

Read also: Data Driven media planning: plan your content effectively

1) Market analysis: why is it essential for a Business Plan (and not just of an online store)?

Let’s start with the fact that an ecommerce business plan is a real project, aimed at turning an idea into a commercially feasible reality. Themarket analysis section provides real evidence that there is a niche market your company can exploit.

Therefore, it is crucial to understand the market opportunities, that is, in summary:

• What the market is worth right now,
• How active the demand is (in terms of awareness and volume),
• how many people search Google, Amazon and Youtube for different issues in the industry.

The target market analysis is the key section of your business plan because it allows you to demonstrate your awareness of the industry you want to enter.

Is the market expanding, contracting, or stable? What evidence do you have to prove this?

These are just some of the questions we can answer with a market survey.

As you may have guessed, at this stage (as at all others) we certainly cannot rely on chance or on studying, one by one, the documents that affect your market.

We at CMI have long outgrown these methods, which take months from requesting a business plan to submitting it!

We have to query very powerful software to intercept all the necessary data, organize the extracted information, and translate it in a short time into reports that can be read by everyone, not just market research experts.

Our goal is to get real data that can be used right away by companies. In this case yours.

2) Study of target customers for your online shop’s business plan.

How can you tell if there are enough consumers in your target market, and that those consumers there are willing to buy your products at the price you necessarily have to charge to make a profit?

Simple: with market research aimed at studying target customers, enabling you to know exactly who your customers are, what they are looking for, and what needs they want to satisfy.

Target customers are the interested people who buy regularly or who have a need to buy but, for a certain reason, have not yet done so (what reason? This also needs to be found out).

Our data-driven approach allows us to do a comprehensive sketch of your target customer base, understand their desires, preferences, and what topics lead them to approach your future or current competitors.

You need to include all this data in your business plan so that you always have it at hand to adopt winning strategies in both the short and long term!

3) Competitive analysis and business plan for ecommerce

Competitor analysis tells you which competitors are currently the most visible, how well known they are, how much they bill, and how much traffic they can drive to their e-commerce.

In order to better estimate financial data, we can also know how much your competitors convert (this is probably one of the information you most want to know)!

Through targeted market studies we can know how many people have entered a site and how many of those people have made it to check out and to a payment system.

This information helps you get an idea of how much you are able to convert in your industry at this precise moment in history.

On Amazon we can know this very precisely, while on third-party merchants we can estimate earnings based on conversion rate.

We don’t know exactly what the spending is, but we can know how interested consumers are and which products are the highest rated within a given ecommerce.

Read also: Business Strategy: why you can no longer do without Marketing Intelligence

Why do you need a business plan before opening an e-commerce business?

You need a business plan to understand whether it is indeed appropriate to delve into a particular market, but also to demonstrate to your investors the opportunities you are going to take.

In the case of an online store, you absolutely have to be able to know your target customer, the active online demand on Amazon and Google, because from this information you can figure out how many people search for and buy the products you want to sell.

Only in this way can you get an idea of how much you can expect to get out of your ecommerce and thus what are the best strategies to adopt.

Understanding what others are doing and what you can do means working wisely, not proceeding tentatively but in a confident and success-oriented way.

So what are you waiting for?

Contact us now to request a Business plan for your e-commerce and get all the information you need to start your business!