Project Checklist

Table of contents

Products

If you're an existing brick and mortar store, will you offer

  • your whole product range
  • a subset
  • additional products
  • a completely alternate set of products?

How many products will you offer in total number? 1, 10, 50, 10,000, 100,000? 

Product Types

Are your products virtual (software based)

Are your products shippable?

Do you offer subscription or recurrently billed items?

Do you sell grouped packages of other items in your store?

Are your items completly unique (single art-based items)

Would you consider your product sales requirements to be pretty unique?

Do you sell events

Do your events repeat (every month, every week)

Do you need to automatically replenish event inventory based on specific dates?

Do you rent hotel rooms or simliar?

If so, how do you manage your hotel booking calendar?

Multiple Skus

Will you offer multiple same-price SKUs per product (items in multiple sizes and colors)

Will you offer other price modifiers per product? (product levels, alternate versions with more features)

Will each product contain multiple images per product? Multiple Images per sku or option?

Do you currently use SKUs to identify products?

How are your SKUs generated (by a system, or arbitrarily)?

Do your products require PDFs or technical documentation?

Do you offer per-item or per-transaction warranties or service?

Customers

Does your site target businesses? Or does it target the general public

Do you expect existing customers to use the site? If so, do you have existing customer data to import?

Do you require customers to be logged in before they can add items to the basket?

Do you require customers to be logged in before they complete checkout?

Do you need to synchronize member data with offline member data on a regular basis?

Locations and Currencies

Will your site service one country, some countries, or all countries?

Do you use a single currency (if so, which)

Will you use multiple currencies? (if so, please list)

Do you charge different prices for items based on location and/or currency?

Are the prices preset, or do you require dynamic conversion into local currencies?

If you use dynamic conversion, or preset prices, do you disclose the conversion calculations?

Do you have a merchant account that supports multiple currencies?

Marketing and Advertising

Do you need to publish your items to services like Amazon, Google, or eBay dynamically?

Do you use google adwords or other ad services to drive traffic to your site?

If so, do you need to track purchase performance to your ad service? 

Search

Will you allow search, and if so, how do you expect search to work?

  • Search by product title
  • Search by brand
  • Search by description
  • Search by price
  • Search by characteristic (size, color)
  • Search by product codes

Do you expect to offer filtering (see above)

Will you offer product categories or groupings?

If so, do you have a methodology identified for structuring your product groupings and categories?

Will items cross into different categories?

How often will categories and groupings be updated

Do you need to edit attributes for items across groupings & categories

Promotions

Will you offer coupons/vouchers and site-wide discounts?

Do you offer member-group specific pricing?

Do you offer member-group percentage based discounts?

Are all items included in these discounts?

Do you offer gift certificates?

Do those certificates work online and offline?

Are your certificates managed by your payment processor, or will they be handled by the site itself?

Do you offer time-limited discounts?

Do you offer category wide discounts?

Do you offer buy-x-get-x or buy-x-get-y free (or discounted) type special offers?

Do you offer discounts based on past purchases?

Do you offer per-item sales prices?

Do you offer quantity based discounts?

If you have other offer types you'd like to provide, please list them.

Do you have a customer loyalty or customer credit awarding scheme?

Payments

Do you have a merchant account?

Does your merchant account have special requirements for Ecommerce transactions?

Do you have a payment gateway? (this might be the same as your merchant account)

Will you take payments directly on your site, or will the customer be directed offsite to complete the payment

If taking payments on your site directly, are you prepared to spend about $400+ per month for hosting related costs? (If not, prepare for offsite payments)

Are you aware of PCI Compliance and do you have PCI documentation?

Do you offer layaway/lay-by sales

Do you take PayPal (if so, which methods)

Do you take Credit Cards? (if so, which)

Do you take other payments (pre-paid credits or purchase account, in-store pickup, by check, by telephone, lay-away, COD, other[please describe] )

Do you need to authorize a transaction, and later charge the transaction

If so, will the costs vary from the authorization to the final transaction?

Taxes

Do you charge VAT?

Do your prices already include VAT?

Do you need to show prices with and without VAT Included?

Are all your products taxable (or mixed with and without tax)?

If not, how are exemptions handled?

Do you need to collect VAT numbers? Do you need to collect VAT Numbers for non-UK and non EEC customers as well?

Shipping and Delivery

What method do you use to calculate shipping costs?

If you do not have a shipping methodology, do you need help creating one?

Do you use UPS, USPS, FedEx or Canada Post (or similar service) to ship?

If you do use one of these services can you pre-estimate shipping costs yourself, or do you always require access to those shipping services?

Do you offer in-store pickup?

Is there an associated cost with it?

Is this an option the customer can select?

In general do you offer multiple shipping options?

Do these options have different costs associated?

How is shipping calculated?

  • Location
  • Weight
  • Quantity
  • Price
  • Shipping Option
  • Product type
  • Other (explain)

Please list in detail any of your shipping methodology.

Do you ship yourself, or is your shipping handled by a fulfillment or drop-ship center?

Inventory

Do you intend to manage inventory on the website itself?

Will you update inventory counts manually? Or automatically?

If automatically, do you have a POS system, or a distributor that needs to update the system?

Have you contacted your POS provider or Distributor and discussed online sales and inventory management with them?

Is inventory handled peritem, or per item-option?

Do you need to automatically update content and availability of items in your store?

Do you have existing inventory and content you need to import?

Orders

Do you want to notifiy customers based on the current status of the order automomatically with email? (shipped, completed, backordered, etc)

Do you update status manually? Or is the status updated by a third-party fulfillment system

Do you need access to customer information?

Do you require sales reports? If so, please list the types of reports you need.

Do you need to export order data or member data?

General

What sales volume do you expect

Are you updating an existing ecommerce system, or is this a completely new venture for you?

Do you have an administrative staff that needs to be trained on the system?

Is your staff prepared to work online?

Can your staff use a computer to scale, crop, and otherwise manipulate images?

Does your staff have a basic understanding of HTML? (eg. setting paragraphs, bold, italics, headers, image tags and other basic HTML?)  If you expand your business ot overseas markets, will it affect your fulfillment?

Do you have a publicly avaiable phone number (may be required in some locations)

Do you have a privacy policy available?

Do you have a return policy available?

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