Selling Online #4 : Development

Last month I wrote about the types of infrastructure options available for your internet retailing efforts. The conclusion being that the rest of this series is going to assume that you are going to custom develop your site on an established e-commerce platform (as opposed to complete custom development or a turn-key, cookie- cutter based solution).

So who’s going to design and build your internet retail presence? You’ve essentially got two choices. You can hire people internally to take it on, or you can use a professional design and development firm. Please make special note of the word “professional.” The guy that maintains your computers but does web development on the side is probably not the right person if you want to take this seriously. Preferably you want to choose a firm that is dedicated to internet retailing and has developed their own ecommerce and merchandising platform. Being able to design and develop a professional and profitable ecommerce operation and manage all of the project management aspects that go into it is not something you “kind of” do. You don’t hire carpenters to wrench on bikes, even though they both use tools right?

The absolute best organization would be to have a highly competent employee with an excellent mix of technical, business, and product knowledge be the point-man to manage a top-notch development partner during the design and development phases, and who is then responsible for internet retail operations (strategic and tactical) once the site is live.

When you look to a contract development firm to partner with, there are some things you need to be aware of. Besides the typical things such as history, financial stability, reference accounts, etc., when it comes to web design, you need to understand their areas of expertise. While I don’t have the space to go into detail on all of these, the person in your company that will be managing the design firm needs to understand them, and use them as measurement criteria when choosing a firm. Do they have a strong information architecture practice? What about usability practices and testing? How strong is their graphic design team? What about marketing and branding support? If they are dedicated to developing eCommerce sites, do they have a strong focus on merchandising and other techniques that will make the site more profitable?

The next best structure would be to have an internal employee dedicated to the design, development, and operation of the site. This person needs to have a strong combination of business sense (you are going to place some major outlays of capital in their hands), technical competence (they need to be well versed in internet related programming languages and development environments such as your chosen eCommerce platform), graphic design and production skills (they need both artistic skills and technical skills to use the tools available), as well as in-depth knowledge of the products you are selling (they are going to be responsible for the merchandising and management of the store once it’s live). As you can imagine, it’s going to be very difficult to find this person, therefore you may need to have more than one person that will work as a team.

In closing, here are some tidbits about how to deal with whomever it is that you work with to develop your site, especially when working with an outside partner firm.

Understand who you are talking to at any given point in the program and what their point of view is. Programmers, artists, marketing folks, and the salesperson you speak with all have their own language and can have vastly different interpretations of what your goals and objectives are. Make 100% sure that there is zero ambiguity in the contract before the first line of code is written or the first design mock-up is produced. Small differences in interpretation early in the project can explode into a disastrous implementation. Misunderstandings about design direction, features, functions, and other deliverables are the number one reason a relationship between a development partner and your shop can go sour. You need to understand how to communicate with and direct your developer to avoid problems, and next month I’ll go into more detail about how to prepare for the engagement and how to manage it once it’s begun.

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