Tools: Menu : B2C

B2C Checklist : download PDF
To have a B2C site that stands out, it must do more than deliver an engaging consumer experience. Inventory your readiness to create a site that can capture and keep online customers.

1. What are your business goals for your Web site?
If you have an existing business, is the Web site just an additional channel or a different way of doing business? How will you quantify the business impact of the IT investments?

2. How long will it take to get your site up and running?
What issues could delay development or deployment? Skills training? Ease of development? Dependencies? What impact would a delay have on your revenue model?

3. What customer services will you provide online?
Order tracking? Account review? Online billing? Payments? Customer support?

4. What information would you like to learn about your customers?
Do you want to provide a more personalized Web shopping experience? Modify your product/service offerings? What business intelligence systems can you automate?

5. Have you developed a privacy policy to post on your site?
What are your customers' expectations? If you offer personalization features, what assurances will you provide about the confidentiality of their data? Are you keeping informed of different countries' laws governing data collection, use, and notification?

6. How frequently will you change your online catalog or home page?
How will you communicate new services or product offerings? Will you offer e-mail notifications or electronic newsletters?

7. What cross-selling opportunities could increase your revenues?
What companies will you partner with, and how will you resolve integration issues?

8. Will you pull data from various content feeds-news, weather, events-to display on your Web site?
How will you handle multiple data formats? Do your Web developers know XML?

9. Does your business lend itself to creating an online community around common interests?
What features would appeal to your constituents?

10. Will you offer premiums for special (high volume) customers?
How will you identify this group?

11. If you have a bricks-and-mortar store, what will be the relationship between your online and physical store?
Will inventory systems be separate? Can a customer who buys a product online walk into a store and return it? Will prices be the same in both venues?

12. What is your demand-generation plan?
What will be your balance between traditional advertising and Web advertising? How will you manage and track ad performance online?

13. Can you build a robust, secure shopping experience that minimizes the transaction complexities for the customer?
What are the bottlenecks, such as too many steps, having to enter personal data repeatedly, lack of online customer support?

14. What is your timeframe goal for responding to customer queries about a product, shipping, service, or Web site complaints and suggestions?
How can you automate the process?

15. How fast do you expect your site traffic to grow?
How scalable is your platform?

16. What seasonal or special-event demand could spike traffic to your site?
What are your contingency plans to deal with unexpectedly high volumes?

17. How quickly will you be able to add new features to your site?
Is your platform flexible? Do your developers need additional training?

18. How easy will it be to host or maintain your site, given your existing resources?
What criteria would you use to select a hosting vendor?

19. How will you build virus or hacker protection into your network without slowing performance?
Does your plan for security include demilitarized zones (DMZ), firewalls, network segregation, data encryption, and intrusion detection? Are you obtaining digital certificates and using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) as a secure channel for credit card transactions?

20. In the event of catastrophe, do you have a site-disaster recovery plan in place?
Denial-of-service attack? Virus invasion? System failure? What outside resources can you engage quickly?

21. If you are Web-enabling an existing business, which executive will be the B2C champion?