 And today I'm talking about scoping e-commerce projects and more often than not when I talk to people who work on e-commerce projects I discover that they step into it a little too lightly a little too casual with not enough preparation Not enough knowledge and then downstream loser shirts Does that make sense? All right, so that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to cover a whole lot of Information and so if you're the kind of person who's like, oh, you went too fast, all right I didn't write it all down Here's where the slides are located, right? So if you go to slideshare.net Slash CF lemma you will find on my side next but the first one is this one, right? So we're going to cover ten different areas and in those ten areas where I cover four questions each right? So this 40 questions we're going to cover and to do that you might go I sure would like to know where the slides are so here it is so that you don't have to freak out about Getting all these questions and as I mentioned, right the biggest risk the largest risk you're building out stores Happen way before you start writing Right the biggest challenges all happen because you don't take enough time to ask the questions You don't take enough time to understand the customer You don't take enough time to help the customer think through their strategies and so later pops up Right it just pops it like they say something right like you have a customer who's like in the middle of your project They've never talked about anything except plain vanilla e-commerce They're all they do is try to design design design, so you're working so hard about a designer You're doing iterations doing all this great work, and then like two weeks before it goes live I like where's the wish list functionality And you're like what? And they say the words of every freelancer an agency that does e-commerce loves to hear it well on Amazon And you're like right because you have Amazon budget like what why are we talking about this right? But you don't want to discover that two weeks before you go on right? So what we're going to do is talk about these ten Scoping areas right understand the customer understand the project understand the store think about products thinking about the visitors You have orders and demand or scale the features. I put a nice right You know like oh, this is the way customers are right. I have an idea right, but in the end it feels like a complication And then close all right So I should have this before we get into Any of the questions is if you ask the question hey, what do you think about this and they go I don't know What do you think? That's not necessarily that right there's nothing wrong with the customer not being Fully immersed in the world of e-commerce and knowing every possibility and having an opinion on every possible thing That's not bad, but if you don't budget For every one of those. I don't know what you think right budget to do research You have to look at all the options right budget to figure out Okay, what's the right strategy budget to have the conversation and say hey customer you got this option You got this option. I recommend this but here's this and then to go forward you're talking about hours That you may have missed for every different. I don't know what you think that makes sense All right, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna get into these 10 areas and the first area is the customer background, right? You ask who built the current site and how do you find them and you're going what does it have to do with the stuff? I got a bill right no It doesn't have to do with the stuff yet to build it has to be the person sitting across the table Right and more often than not We jump right into right we start asking you get what feature and what design what visual design and we're thinking through all The solutions without paying attention to the fact that there's someone sitting in front of us and we need to understand What's going on now imagine if the customer in front of you said something like Well, you're my 16th developer in the last year. Yeah, I want to ask more about that Right, what happened? What was going on? Right? How did you find them? Well? Here's what I do, right? I have a nephew my nephew super cool. I go to my nephew and I say who should I hire to build my website? My nephew tells me everything Okay, that's odd right but not I mean I don't know your nephew I can't decide right then someone else says well I have a I have a spiritualist and I take it my spiritualist or someone else says well I have a buddy of mine who runs at Amazon and so I just ask him what to do It doesn't matter what you do get as an answer You just need to be aware of okay. I need to understand what I'm dealing with you I need to understand who's across the table and what their expectations or the dynamics are and how do I protect myself in the midst of this, right? The next one Who does the maintenance? Right, you may be sitting in the world thinking okay Well, we're gonna do is we're gonna build the website and they're gonna hand it off to their internal team to manage it from here And then you may discover they don't have an internal team or you may be working on the presumption that you're building it And you will maintain it so you can I'm gonna use my framework because I know how to do this, etc And then they say oh, no, we have an internal team that's gonna do this Right, so Understanding what what's the plan here right? Tell me more about your organization help me understand who's doing what who does the maintenance? That makes sense. What is this store for bits in the business model? I? worked on a website once on on a store for a fairly large known company And I thought oh my god, this is gonna be awesome. We're gonna do this. Well, it turned out. No, that wasn't the case It was a pet project. It was a pet project for one of the senior Bees at the company and so I thought okay, this is gonna be a big this would be huge right? So what am I doing right? I'm I'm thinking yes, I want to make money But also I really want you know to get my name and lights as it relates to this kind of project with this kind of company This is gonna be awesome and then that stakeholder that key person I Lost power and authority in their organization and suddenly the project just got killed right you go Well because I presume that this store was gonna be intrinsic to their overall business model and it wasn't related to no Right, they kill it without blinking didn't affect them. So understanding wait. How do you guys make money? Right, how do you where you what is the flow within which this product sits? In terms of how you generate revenue where what is this part? People at the second line square. It was like we want this whole store thing and then they were like, okay now turn up all the buy buttons You're like what? They'll even building this store for weeks. They're like just turn up all about it's just a catalog You know like if it was a catalog we could have done this in such a different way Again, you just realized I didn't ask about what they were planning to use it for how it fit And lastly I can't tell you how many times you think you're sitting in front of The key stakeholder the person who makes the final decision the one who approves and it's not just because you know You're not thinking it's because they're acting out right like all the first iterations of the design They say I don't like that. I do like this. Okay. Now. We're good. I don't like that. I do like this We're good and so they're doing it. They're acting as the final say and then you get all done with the project Right and you're now ready to launch And it turns out someone else has to Someone else comes in and it's brand new requirements time. Oh Now that I'm you know and the other person that you've been interacting with is like, oh, well now I got to take up my boss Right, I wasn't going to show it to my boss until I was totally happy But now my boss has a little bit and my boss has to make the call and the boss shows up and goes well You haven't done this you haven't even agree with this this doesn't look right because of this We got to make sure you get so-and-so in here to evaluate this part of it and the project just goes doubles in size without doubling the revenue project cost is saying expectations just Grow you're like whoa, so you start early Tell me about the process tell me and sometimes you just have to ask silly questions and be super comfortable asking silly questions Like so if you like zebra stripes and I build this whole thing designed with zebra stripes And then we launch it. There's nobody in your company who can reject your idea of zebra stripes And they're like well, actually I mean I would never pick zebra stripes. I'm more cheetah guy, but seriously You know, yeah, actually there's this person and this person's like, oh, who are they tell me more about them? How does this work where they have to do it if you make the color blue, right? If you have the shade of blue, just tell me who are these other people? But you have to be willing to dig in a little and get people to react so that you understand what you do and Sometimes the stakeholders are not in the business that you're talking to Right local pre-commerce They may have tax partners shipping partners Procurant supply Distribution fulfillment all sorts of kind of partners that need sign off in something right and then you're like, oh, man You don't want to find those out at the end. All right Make sense good. It's not the end all right I'm not saying ask these four questions. I never talked to the customer again I'm gonna say let's make sure you remember to ask these questions because they will help you in understanding the scope of your product So then you dig in a little to the product itself, right? Hey You have a target date for when you need this to go live I joined a company once we were building a very very large e-commerce platform a business-to-business marketplace exchange and The whole time we were chatting right I was going pretty good. I had a multi-million dollar budget I had the ability to go hire my own team Everything was awesome, right? And then when we got I got hired and then I had 30 days to bring the team together So I brought the team together in 30 days We got ready to build out a prototype in 30 days, and then it was time to start writing the real code, right? And we get into it and we're the teams already there so the 30 days are in maybe we're halfway into the prototype and The exact team comes back and says hey by the way we want to launch this app this very large card car show and It's in Germany, and this is the date And I'm like well, I thought we had a year and a half like well because we want to watch it at this at this car show We need you done in seven months if you take a 18 month project turned to a seven month project You will hate your life. I know from experience right we did 20 hour days Six days a week. We had half a day off for Christmas Me it was insane now. We've got it launched, which was good news, right? We did a billion dollars worth of transactions in six months and everything was wonderful Except my personal life, right? So when we were done with the project my wife's like and I think it's time for you to find a new job You're like, oh, I didn't realize that those time-writes are gonna be those time-writes now Not everybody has that kind of craziness, but can we still have a customer who says oh, actually this is a heartbeat Not when you get done It's a heartbeat the date is for this show for this event or this partner me or something and you're like I need to know Which states are just so locked in that I have to know You gotta have everything done. Can you share your project's budget? Right, can you share now some people say no, I'm not telling you what I'm budget for Okay, I Thought I was super sneaky right. I thought I was I was sharp I asked a guy to come build a pool in our backyard Right, and I had a hole. I mean it wasn't just the pool right is the the decking is the army It's cutting into the hill. It's this huge pool. It's a very large jacuzzi. It's a waterfall There's a cave behind the waterfall. I got this whole plan and then he says all right. What's your budget? And I go? I'm not negotiating myself. You tell me what it cost Because I thought I'm smart And he goes, oh, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years in general Whatever you had budgeted is probably twice that And I said I'm not sending and I do have a number which was essentially 2x what I've been thinking And so then he did divide by half and he said so you're thinking about this kind of budget You trust me That's insane Right, but he was like look at the end of the day, right? Everybody has an idea of what they want to spend right everybody has an idea of what they want to spend and The trick for us when we're talking to the customer and trying to understand that is to say are you willing to share with me, right? We all are right. Where are you at? You can tell we've done projects at 5,000 or we've done projects if you're in the 25 to 50 ring 50,000 like wherever you are using we've done projects this Level and we've done projects this level. I just want to understand where you're seeing right, but ask Somebody say, oh, they'll never tell me you won't know unless you ask so ask about the budget Another of my favorites is maybe you have a list of requirements already written out This sounds horrible, right because almost no client ever says well actually I do It's all right here, right more often than I don't know. I just know what I like great, right? But let's be clear if we don't have a clear articulation spec. That's not and that's not like a definitely project It's fine But we may need to kick into a discovery project, right? Where we actually tease out some things and facilitate getting that requirement and the reason I love discovery Because it's not just my ability to dig in deeper and understand and be able to have a focus scope of what the project is but I Get that extra little time to figure out is this the person of the company I want to do work with So at the end of the scope and the end of the discovery I Might have a great report. I might be able to give them a report that says these are all the requirements You have and here's a quote that we think it would cost to do it But I can also say you can shop it around and go for the quotes and it turns out now Let me see the man is doing this project We're probably not a good fit or we don't have this kind of time or we won't be available until next summer Whatever you want if you want to disengage because suddenly there's enough red flags in the process that you go I don't want to do I don't want to get into the project Does that make sense? now I Know that every time we talk about priority or trade-off I know something I say well hold on I hate those things right you know here at three pick two blah blah blah And so I understand that but I do want to highlight There's a certain kind of prioritization in e-commerce that can be really helpful right and it's it's these three things It's the speed of the store It's the speed of the project itself and it's the design Every one of those has a cost factor when it comes to time right if you want an elaborate design if you want You know custom templates for every category and different ones for different categories and you want custom templates for product pages And there's also different ones based on the kind of products it is Etc right there's gonna be time to design If you just want the shortest product so you can watch the fastest right that's the speed of death And that's gonna be great But you're gonna make trade-off from there, and then if someone says no, but I thought it would be fast You're like no optimizing the store for speed is a whole different bulky And it won't come just naturally because I do some stuff together We just we just worked on a project I work at a company called liquid web and we have a platform for hosting e-commerce and we had a client cost or a prospect cost their whole what's it crashed on Sunday right Sunday And it was their biggest loss they've been prepping for six months Right and the site crashed after three minutes on AWS and it was it wasn't AWS fault Well, there was a misconfiguration and some of the infrastructure, but uh, but the code for the site was just not It was not coded for speed performance scalability so Every page loaded anywhere from 13 to 24 seconds The which one you're like, I wouldn't call this a store Right, I call the museum and spend a lot of time just waiting for these things to appear for you But no one's buying anything right and so we spent 48 hours right Recoding stuff for a portion of the new products right a little micro site and we watched it and Tuesday night and went live they made more money in the first two hours of Tuesday night Then they had all through the whole year today Right, they made more money in every ten minutes than they had made in their best days in December Which was their highest month last week Everything's great, but when you code for the speed of the site is the performance like you code differently Right now some people who are really good at the same That's the way I put everything but in general when you are out there doing projects I like this team or the customer show them since I like this team and all of a sudden And I want these features and you start having plug-ins by the time you're done You have four seconds six seven eight second load I know no when we launched it right it was like point seven seconds of load and we're like, oh, you're fine And they work right they had that 7,000 views a minute right people just moving to the site to 300 and currently goes and check out and you go Yeah, but it's because it's coded for the speed of the store So when you're asking that customer question, I'm telling you very private like let's just help understand Right, it's not that there's a specific answer. It's you trying to determine and understand Right, what's important when we were talking at this client It was Sunday night two in the morning and I had the development team on their previous development team and I had the business on and I said, why are you doing this this way? I would get rid of all this you're having a whole bunch of calls back today It's let's just clear this out and the developers again But that's what they wanted so that they could have this design And I look at the client and I said we're on video I look at the client and said we're gonna have to sacrifice some of the things you wanted for the big thing you want Right, which is customers throughput scalability and sales And the customer was like, yeah, it makes sense to do it But that conversation clearly never happened with their developer Right, and so the developer was doing their best to deliver value to the customer without having this kind of conversation All right, store store about right One of my favorite questions. Hey, what's broken right now, right? If this is not a brand-new build What's broken? Let's that customer pinpoint the thing that they're really unhappy about Entility and the thing is Sometimes you hear the strangest answers that you're like in a normal intake. I would never go lose Right, I would never go Right, like well when someone makes an order I need emails to go here and there You know, yeah, of course that makes sense Well, I also need emails to go to this or this or this this or this based on which product group was in You're like, what wait? Well back. What are you talking? Well, the other system doesn't do it I'm like no system doesn't like tell me what you want and why and explains me and when people are talking about the thing From their perspective what they're telling you is these are things I wish the site did that it doesn't do and I think they're Piring up to talk about it and go great. I want that insight so I can scope it into mine or even if it's going to be a customer The other one. Hey, what feature you're most proud of right? What do you love? What can you not? Get rid of right and maybe that wish list or that gift card and that cue party is the thing They are like this is the best thing ever for us Right. I worked with that with a store That when you bought something on the store, right? Sorry when you bought something in their physical store They gave you a code that allows you go to their online store So their chief product was sold in a physical store But if you bought there then you got a code for the online store and the online store only sold accessories But it was closed out to everything the only way you got in was with that code Well, when they showed us the demo of the store several times over Right, they never did the whole it's not like you can't get in they just showed us the store We're talking about features in the store. And so when you finally get to this one You know, hey, we love the fact that we just put in this code and then we have access We talked about we've seen the demo three times never seen that like oh, no, it's it's that you can't log in unless you have this code Everyone what happened, you know, all of a sudden there's a whole new set of questions because you're asking the question. Hey, what do you love the most? Also, what feature cost you the most? Right, what feature do you have right now the cost of most we did a scan of the website the other day and While we're doing it. We thought this is a normal plain and Jane thing because we didn't go into the WooCommerce settings API hooks To see that they had this elaborate integration using the rest API, which was awesome But in everything that we were scanning looking and wrapped in it. We never caught You catch that by asking questions like hey Where do you spend the most time of money and they go? Oh, it's just one integration third party It does all these things about and all we just do is connect up the rest API Okay. Well, that's that's good to know Right and then lastly in this section of the store Are you using other sales channels? Right. Are you selling on Amazon? Are you selling on eBay? Are you selling on some other little store? Do you have a whole bunch of other micro sites that also sell and connect back to this? I don't know what I don't even ask me, but I just want to know is this the only place Where you're doing sales or you're doing sales other channels. Oh, I have a fiscal store. Oh at the point of sale Oh, you stuff on a mobile app You don't want to find those things out Two thirds in the project when someone else walks in the room and goes hey, where's them? Where's the mobile app interface? What mobile app interface? All right, like the site's responsive you can look at it on mobile app. No, no, no, I mean like the actual app It's not in the scope. We never heard about it. All right, so Hey, are you using other sales channels? All right product details Okay, these are simple. They're not going to shock you how many products you have how many categories you have Hey, are the product photos the prices and the descriptions already ready Are they easily exportable to are they ready to spread you do you really have this data? Oh No, no, we were hoping you can help us get photos of the products Oh, that's interesting that just added 40 hours to the project or a hundred hours Right are the photos ready my very first e-commerce project And it's a long time ago, but my very first one was a florist And she sent me 300 photos of the flowers And I opened up every image and Photoshop and clean it up Clean up every single photos Cropped it made it look beautiful and put it back on their store sign so that they can have a really great e-commerce store I did all this because she was going to give me the hookup for my wedding And I was like that's a good thing. I'll get the floor set a discount because I'll build their e-commerce store When the emails went out from the e-commerce store. I said, do you have any where's your email? I what's your email? I don't have email Okay, I'll get you an email. Yeah Well, I don't have anything to read email. Okay, I guess I'll go to your house and install Outlook. I Was their network administrator their IT configurators software installer, right their image photo touch or upper and Then we have to the part I care about that was the okay Give me the discount so she's like well your bill rounds out to 1200. I told you I was gonna hook you up To make it a thousand. I was young. I was dumb All right, how often you make updates are people making updates to their products all the time or not much right And what kind of products do you sell variable products subscription products? Basic products shibble products digital products understand that profile right visitor details Right, who do you sell to so the consumers yourself businesses does that mean you need wholesale pricing right? Help me understand what's going on here because again wholesale pricing is one of those things you could go Days weeks into a project and not know that you suddenly need to do it, right? Hey You also need to support distributors people that are actually pushing the products out. We need to integrate back to those guys right if your store Public or do you sell any members? Is there a membership component to you can buy and then hey Roughly people are visiting now. We're gonna talk about demand in a second But just give you ballpark right how many folks are visiting the store on a daily basis What kind of throughput that we need to be thinking about order details Right How many orders do you have in your system today? If you have to migrate that stuff, right? You need to be thinking about that right and that's the next question Which is hey, do I have to worry about bringing all that over some people like no That's an old system different system. We don't care and other people like oh no I mean of all that stuff brought over that's a that could be a huge project Right, do you manage to orders yourself or are you using a third party again? You got to dig into tell me more about this situation If it is a third party I mean automated system something else right and that consists of the last one in here Which is hey, are you doing any kind of automated? Do I have to connect your store up to something else another system push data through so we can generate products and ship it out Right try to do that at all. Is it printful right is it there are there are ones that do other physical products Right, just tell me what I need to understand about this and then of course stale and Stale is a hard one right because people may tell you only their history and not tell you what's coming next Right in the case of the story worked on last week Their history was decent, but they knew they had a product launch It was gonna be huge massively different right you go, okay, let's let's get into it So what's the most sales you've had today right? What's the most traffic you've had in an hour? Right. Do you have any special upcoming promotions and then my favorite question? I think your store was gonna pay And I would what is a bad question. I just just told me right if your store was gonna fail Is there a volume where you'd be like okay after that? Yeah, that would be okay Right, okay, you get a hundred thousand orders, and then it falls over. Is that okay is it fifty thousand enough right? Is a million or like where is that line that you go? Oh, I mean it was something went down, but we got to this much It would be great right more often than not we don't ask this question And then we can end up getting caught over engineering Right imagine that you're thinking it's fifty thousand so it's okay. We can do three hundred orders All right, okay, that's good to know right that's very different than 10,000 or 50,000 All right feature details. These are the ones that you normally are probably asking today right most of the time Right. Hey, you need the featured products section. Do you need the new products section? Do you have shipping partners you integrate with or that you need to support? Are you collecting tax? Are you using a service? Right what payment options do you want these are the questions that when I watch people have this conversation They know when they're talking features like I need to go configure a plug-in That's not what building a store is about right so if you only ask these questions all those other things you have asked about and then complications now complications is probably It has more tone in it than I wanted to but it gets complicated right hey What about multiple languages and multiple currencies? right Hey, are you selling subscription products because that's going to change things Wishlist features that's going to change things right or do you have any other integrations that we need to make sure? We have more Right all of those things a single answer you're one of those right could add the day a week to your product Lastly hosting right where is your store hosted right now? Okay, all I'm I don't care where your site so right really my second question is how much you think But someone says I'm running this awesome e-commerce store, but it's super slow, but the design is beautiful But I pay three dollars a month right they go well. We should probably have a conversation about your budget, right? But the other one right is hey Are you gonna need staging and testing environments right? How do you take products to market? What's your process? What do you test when you want to introduce a new feature where do you test it? How do you do it? Do you need us involved or do you have that stuff already on law right and we talked about earlier the training of your staff right? Do we need to do this or do you already have it in place? What's going on right if they use another system before and now they're coming to e-commerce? They may have a whole lot of expectations just based on what they've done before and you may have to spend time training and then lastly Will you need us to test your store? When you need us involved in running these tests The folks I worked with this last week they have told their developers for six months right? There's gonna be high traffic and then when we ask them well what testing did you do? And they're like well loads fast on my server or loads fast on my desktop Like that's not testing So 40 questions right and the problem that most of us have is we don't spend enough time doing this discovery We get in over our heads The last thing I'll tell you is hey if you walk up selling e-commerce products, which is not the same as scoping them My friend Jennifer born has a product over Jennifer born.com slash e-commerce sales And she has a wealth of information available to you if you if you want to get into that My name is Chris. I work at the web. You can find me online and at this time. Thank you very much I think we have enough time for one Maybe two questions if they're fast Yeah Do you want this website? Oh The slideshow about that the last question. All right. Yes. Yeah How they ship? Yeah, so that was in there Do you have a preferred shipping partner? Do you have a preferred method of shipping? Do you have a shipping partner? Do you have someone that they agree with was in there because yeah It's one thing when everyone says the same answer right same with payment gateways, right? You hear payment gates authorized on that strike a file authorized on that strike. They find that great Then someone gives you a name you've never heard of And they're like, wait, what is that right and that will take some time All right, last question any third party. Yeah You told so the question is right? The question was if they have a very large integration and it's already working. Can't you Can you still use that right? Yes? if The inputs that API to cause API come from data. You can easily connect the dots on but imagine that you're coming from Oracle e-commerce platform to an API through an API and then you come in with in-commerce and you promise is I don't store that data I have this other data and and then you're like, oh, where's this number? I need this number and they go Yeah, I forgot that number comes from an internal system that we have to integrate with and you're like Oh, I do another iteration to bring that data over so that I can send it out to it And I wish I was saying like this only happens once in the blue and that was all the time Right when you're moving platforms, especially because there's things they forgot they did that thing Five years ago. Right and now they're like, but it should just work. You're like, no, it won't just work All right. Thank you very much. Have a great day