Whether you are creating a new e-commerce website, improving an existing one, or migrating to a new platform, every e-commerce project needs a document outlining requirements for potential partners.
This document can cover design, technologies, and integrations in a way that requirements can be identified and communicated as clear, actionable points.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) lacking digital experience can hire professionals to help identify, document, and prioritize the unique functional needs of their e-commerce project.
As an owner or manager of a small business, you might feel that some requirements are obvious when they are not obvious at all to a web agency.
If key e-commerce requirements are described vaguely, or even completely omitted from your specifications document, you might end up with bad surprises in terms of costs and timeframes.
An e-commerce consultant helps you identify, gather and present your requirements so that they are easily understandable for digital agencies, and reduces the risk of disappointment and recrimination.
For some requirements to be deemed “key”, others must be “not-so-key”.
Establishing a hierarchy of requirements like “Must Have”, “Nice to Have”, etc, enables the design of a minimum viable product and will help with the general project delivery.
An experienced external consultant helps you understand if requirements are likely to be easy or difficult to fulfil so that they can be scored against their importance and phased accordingly.
The process of gathering e-commerce requirements for a website can vary in duration depending on the complexity of your business and the depth of investigation desired. The typical steps include:
Gathering requirements in the proper way adds incredible value to your project, resulting in a comprehensive specifications document.
This document leads to more realistic quotes from agencies, reduces misunderstandings and surprises, and serves as a basis for further discussion if needed.
Depending on the complexity of the project, you can decide how long we will spend on the gathering process, ensuring costs align with your budget.
In collaboration with your consultant, you’ll decide on a fixed total of hours for the gathering process, which will then be split into manageable groups to avoid exceeding your budget.
The process of gathering e-commerce requirements is critical for new website builds, and in this case it’s worth hiring specialized help to investigate what’s needed and what isn’t.
If an e-commerce website is already existing and the owners are looking at re-platforming (e.g. moving from Magento 2 to Shopify), it’s often easier to identify requirements so the process is probably going to be faster.
In any case, if you need to prepare a specifications document and you feel that you don’t know where to start from, you need help.
We typically work with small B2B and B2C businesses that are already established and trading offline.
Our ideal client might be at the beginning of their e-commerce adventure or be already selling online and planning to re-platform their website or to significantly expand its features .
B2B companies, often family owned, are the ones we have worked with the most and we are more familiar with. Some of them also operated a B2C website/channel.
In anything we do at Netsu, we have an informal, hands-on approach. We prefer practice to theory, action to talking. If anyone makes a mistake, we want to focus on finding a solution rather than a culprit.
We see ourselves as part of your team, and we prefer environments were the communication is friendly and open, without politics or grandstanding.
At Netsu, we are platform-agnostic.
We are more experienced in Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce, but we have helped clients with WordPress / WooCommerce and Shopify as well.
As we tent to work on the smaller end of the SMB scale, we typically don’t work with entry-level platforms like Wix or complex enterprise installations.
You know your business best than anyone else, and for this reason you will have to be involved in the requirements gathering process and you will have the last word on the specifications document.
Yet, your familiarity with your business means that an external pair of eyes can point out what is not clear to the less initiated.
Even if you have a digital team, it can be useful to involve an independent consultant to review your requirements and ask questions, make recommendations.
Netsu is a fully remote company, with a team distributed in the UK (Edinburgh), Italy (Milan), and Poland (Poznan).
We recognize the value of meeting in person, but we don’t want to pass over to you any excessive travel costs.
If the chance arises (or if you are happy to cover travel costs), we will be happy to meet in person.
For the e-commerce requirements gathering process, we often need to access a good amount of info from you and your colleagues, so videocalls are probably going to be the most used mean of communication. If you have any, we are happy to use your existing communication tools.
Typically, communication involves using a project management program like Jira or Monday.com, but they might not be needed in this case. Instant messaging, like Slack, is usually not enough as information can get lost.
We don’t code.
We will cooperate with the web developers of your choice, or we will find the ones that fit your needs. These can be offshore or in-country, depending on your requirements.
Do you have questions related to e-commerce and can't find your answer?
Get in touch for an ad-hoc consultation.
Do you need help with day-to-day e-commerce website tasks?
Check out our admin support service.
Do you need assistance with managing your e-commerce website development?
Our e-commerce project management service might be right for you!
