It's hard to know which technology solution is right for you, until you have a detailed list of requirements against which you can compare the solutions. Therefore, before you can choose an e-commerce platform, you have to decide what kind of experience you want to deliver to your online customers. As you do this, think about where your company is going to be in one, two, five, or 10 years. If you set up your solution correctly now, when your company grows and expands, you can add on to the original foundation without tossing out your prior efforts.

    Or, as many companies do, you can go for the quick fix today. This strategy may get you to market faster at a lower cost, but it will cost quite a bit more in the long run, since you'll have to rebuild from the ground up when your site grows (which at the rate things change online, could be as soon as a year from now). Either way, you still need a plan.

    As you build your plan, the first thing you should do is generate a Requirements Document. At this stage, it's a good idea to get all the corporate departments involved. That way you can get everyone's input at the beginning, as opposed to later, when it's too late. You'll also have people who really know how long things take helping you come up with realistic scheduling and budgetary expectations. The other benefit of this summit approach is that it gets ideas and potential conflicts out on the table early. The last thing you want is Frank from Fulfillment telling you a week before launch that the product numbers you're sending him are three characters too long. Gotcha!

    To avoid this kind of scenario, get everyone that's involved in a room for a "Day of Discovery." The information you need to gather can be modeled as a circle that represents your entire sales and marketing cycle. Each stage of the cycle can be a basis of discussion for your summit meeting.

Sales and Marketing Cycle

• Customer: Who are your target customers and what do they need?
  Awareness and advertising: How will you get customers to the store the first time? How will you get them to come back?
• Merchandising: What products will you offer and how will you position and display them to your customers?
• Sales service: How will you answer customers' questions and solve their problems?
• Promotions: How will you promote merchandise and services to give customers incentives to make purchases?
• Transaction processing: How will you handle orders, tax, shipping, and payment processing?
• Fulfillment: How will you pass orders to the fulfillment center?
• Post-sales service: How will you provide customer service and answers to order-status questions after the sale?
• Marketing data and analysis: What information about sales, customer, and advertising trends will you gather? How will you use it to make decisions?
• Brand: How will you communicate with customers during each of these interactions in a way that reinforces your unique company image?

Play by the "Business Rules" Document

    At your D-Day, talk through all the steps that come before and after a transaction. Gather ideas. Discuss constraints and get the raw information you'll need to develop your e-business plan.

    To help keep the ideas flowing and your brain-storming on track, we've created a Business Rules document for you to use as you meet with your team. This isn't a checklist — it's simply a compilation of the e-business issues that you should consider as you carefully lay plans for your e-commerce site. Print it out, put it on the OHP (overhead projector), stick it on the white board, and then use it to generate new ideas and spark innovations of your own.

    After you have all the raw information you need, it's time to prioritize. It is not likely that you'll be able to implement all the things you want in the first release of the store because of constraints in budget or time or because you're the only person working on this project and you haven't slept for three days. Rank each of the features you want with a one for "must have," a two for "nice to have," and a three for "pipe dream." With your priorities in line, you can create your Requirements Document.