In 2013, Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper, the Co-CEOs of BigCommerce, made the following prediction: “By 2022, brick-and-mortar retail spaces will be little more than showrooms.”
It’s hard to deny that they were at least kind of right. The last decade has seen eCommerce explode to the point where online shopping is now the norm for lots of different product types.
The eCommerce industry reflects this — sales are predicted to pass the $6 trillion mark in 2024. For an eCommerce business today, there’s a fantastic amount of opportunity out there, but also a lot of pressure and high expectations.
To succeed in eCommerce, you need to run a tight ship. Your project management skills have to be on point, or you risk spiralling into confusion and inefficiency, disappointing your customers and wrecking your brand.
In this article, we’ll look at why eCommerce project management is so important, some of the key concepts you should be aware of, and the steps you need to take to succeed.
What is eCommerce project management?
Project management, in the context of eCommerce, is all about bringing together the various moving parts of your eCommerce business together in the most efficient and productive way. It’s about getting the job done with minimal wastage, frustration, and delays, and with the best possible outcome.
This means using all the tools, technologies, and strategies at your disposal in the best way possible.
It also means finding the best people for the job and giving them everything they need to perform at the highest level and work together successfully.
If this sounds easy, it’s not. eCommerce project management is famously difficult, and there’s no one right way to do it. The good news is that you can rely on some battle-tested frameworks to make things easier.
Why is eCommerce project management important?
Without the right approach to project management it’s easy to end up spinning your wheels, failing to generate the traffic and brand presence you need to drive revenue while letting your customers down.
Without a rock-solid strategy, you’ll run into delays and setbacks, poorly aligned teams, and ultimately a lot of money left on the table. In the rest of this article, we’ll show you how to avoid that.
Examples of eCommerce projects
What does an eCommerce project actually look like? They come in all shapes and sizes, to achieve a range of different goals. Here are some of the most common reasons to embark on an eCommerce project:
- Website development — building a new website to drive traffic to your brand, allow customers to browse your products and make purchases, and share useful or entertaining content. This type of project might also involve making website updates or revamping an existing website.
- App development — developing an app so customers can view your products and make purchases even more easily. Apps can also be great marketing tools and can make it easier to reward customers and simplify the customer experience.
- Integrations — integrating your marketing funnel, websites, and other channels with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to streamline your operations and access new valuable insights
- Subscription-based services — building the infrastructure you need to run a smooth and successful subscription-based service, for example setting up a recurring billing system and maintaining customer support
- Omnichannel integration — setting up a unified system so that your online store and sales processes are connected with your physical infrastructure like inventory and shipping
As you can see, there are many different objectives an eCommerce project manager might have, and each project type will come with its own unique challenges. However, the same fundamentals will pretty much always apply.
How to crush eCommerce project management
To succeed in eCommerce project management, you need to rely on the right methodologies — those that have been proven effective time and again. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here, you’ll only create more work in an already challenging process.
So what does an eCommerce do? Here are the main steps to follow to succeed in eCommerce project management.
Be clear about your goals and objectives from the start
Project management depends on a solid foundation — if you don’t have a clear direction from the very beginning you are dooming your team to failure, with a detour of stress and confusion.
Take some time to set clear, measurable goals for your team. The SMART acronym is a good rule of thumb here — keep your goals specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.
When setting goals, involve other team members. This allows you to benefit from their opinions and insights, and also makes sure everyone is on the same page from the very start.
Choose the right project methodology and strategy
There are several popular methodologies you can rely on to shape and guide your project management, each with their own pros and cons.
Methodologies like these are useful because they bring structure to your project. They make it possible to follow a pre-set framework that has been honed through trial and error over many projects, so you don’t need to start from scratch.
Here are some of the main project management methodologies to consider.
- Agile Project Management — this is commonly used in software development projects, and is based on the idea of constant testing and forward movement. In Agile project management projects are broken down into smaller pieces and reviewed at each step to find out how to improve. This iterative approach means you get constant feedback and can course-correct constantly throughout the project lifecycle.
- Waterfall Project Management— one of the oldest project management frameworks, Waterfall is sequential (as opposed to iterative). You create a plan and set phases and the beginning, and then follow these in order. If you have a clear, simple goal, Waterfall can be an excellent methodology, but for more complex projects with time constraints it can fall short.
- Kanban Project Management — this is where you’ll divide your project into smaller tasks and label each one either “to do,” “in progress,” or “complete.” By breaking the project down in this way, you get a lot of flexibility and can change and tweak each subtask on a more granular level.
- Lean Project Management — as the name suggests, the Lean project management methodology is all about reducing waste and inefficiency. This means prioritizing more important features that customers care about most, and cutting down on meetings. The goal is to (sometimes ruthlessly) emphasize value for the customer at all times.
- Scrum Project Management — the Scrum framework is all about working together with maximum efficiency. It uses sprints to break the project into chunks, each of which is under the guidance of a Scrum Master. There are daily team meetings to review progress and make sure everyone is on the same page and has everything they need.
Set the right KPIs to track
Setting and tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to take a much more data-driven approach to your eCommerce project management.
You’ll be able to make decisions based on hard evidence rather than gut feelings, quickly pinpoint any areas for concern, and make adjustments and improvements whenever needed.
The KPIs you choose to track will depend on the goals you set at the beginning, as well as the nature of your project and the methodologies you use.
Let’s take a look at some project management KPIs first:
- Budgeted vs. Actual Cost — measures the difference between what you initially planned to spend on a project and the actual final cost
- Delivery Cost — the total amount you spent on the project. This includes resources, staff salaries, contractors, subscriptions to new tools, marketing, and so on.
- Overdue Tasks — how many tasks are currently overdue, and how many missed their deadlines in total
- Customer Satisfaction — based on polls and surveys, this attempts to find an empirical score for how your customers feel about your product or service
Now let’s take a look at some key eCommerce KPIs:
- Sales — a measure of how many sales you’ve made so far. You can break this down according to a specific time period or segment of your market.
- Conversion Rate — the percentage of users who make a purchase (or take another desired action) after visiting your website
- Customer Retention Rate — the percentage of customers who remain customers over a certain time period
- Average Order Size — the average amount customers spend on an order
With the right KPIs in place you’ll gain way more visibility into different elements of your project, which allows you to make decisions more confidently, avert disasters, and showcase your successes to company decision-makers and stakeholders.
Have the right people in the right places
At its core, project management is about people. The success of your eCommerce project will depend heavily on having the right people in the right places, using their talents to maximum effect.
The key to success here is knowing every team member. There’s no shortcut — you need to take the time to understand your team so you can make sure everyone is in the best place and has everything they need to get the job done.
Communication is also a major factor here. You don’t need to have daily multi-hour meetings, but using tools like Slack to stay in touch and encouraging questions and team collaboration can go a long way to building a more aligned team.
Time to launch
A lot hinges on how you manage the launch of your eCommerce project.
You’ll need a solid marketing strategy in place, one that uses appropriate marketing channels like social media, paid ads, email marketing, video marketing, and content marketing.
For best results here you need a deep understanding of your target market and where they spend their time, and the only way to get this is through in-depth market research.
And don’t forget the pre-launch process — in the weeks leading up to the launch send your audience regular reminders and teasers to hype them up for the big moment and let them know what they stand to gain.
Monitor and adjust over time
Your project isn’t over after the launch — it’s only just beginning. Once your new product or products are live, the real learning can begin.
This is where KPIs matter. Tracking the right metrics on an ongoing basis will allow you to make changes in real-time, in response to real customer feedback and data.
A tech-driven approach to eCommerce project management
Today’s eCommerce project managers are lucky — they have access to tools and technologies that their predecessors could only dream about.
The right technology can make project management easier and more efficient, and deliver better results to your customers.
One of the most impactful trends here is AI. With the right AI and automation tools, eCommerce project managers can plan, run, and track projects far more easily and successfully than before.
That’s what Forecast is all about — harnessing the power of AI to give you a suite of powerful project management tools in one simple platform. Book a demo with us if you’re interested in finding out more.
