E-commerce Requirements Gathering

Start your e-commerce Journey with the right foot, instead of shooting yourself in it

a team works at writes notes and schemes while gathering requirements for their e-commerce project
Pietro Reading From a Book Titled "How To Build a B2B E-Commerce"

The First Step Before Anything Else

What is E-commerce Requirements Gathering?

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.

  • For example, the requirements-gathering process can lead to:
  • Discovering that the e-commerce platform X is better than platform Y for integrating the company's ERP.
  • Dividing website users into groups, and design a relevant discount structure.y.
  • Describing a bespoke functionality to allow users to upload yearly order forecasts.
  • Describing a bespoke integration of a CNC machine used for made-on-order products.
  • Describing a marketing assets portal for B2B users to access product pictures and descriptions.
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write a bomb-Proof Specifications Document with the help of a Netsu consultant

When do you need Assistance with the E-Commerce Requirements Gathering process?

Pietro sitting in front of a laptop while auditing an e-commerce website

Hindsight is 20/20.

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.

when everything is important, nothing is important.

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.

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What can you expect?

How does the service work?

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:

  1. Commitments-free consultation
    A quick call will allow everyone to determine the mutual fit and the scope of the admin support.
  2. Sign-off and onboarding
    It will be very important to understand your business model, product, service, and sales cycle as they might dictate some specific requirements that are unique to you. To make sure we capture this, we will need to familiarize ourselves with your company, operations, etc. This is not too dissimilar from joining your company as a new employer would, and therefore we’ll need to be shown around, and our questions answered.
  3. Execution phase
    While populating the various sections of the specifications document, we’ll maintain communication with you.
  4. Delivery/Further steps
    At the end of the process, you will receive a document that will outline the requirements of your e-commerce project, ready to submit to agencies. If you desire so, we can accompany you through the agency/technologies selection process, and even through the website build process.
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How much does it cost?

our E-Commerce Requirements Gathering Process is flexible.

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.

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An Ad Hoc service

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.

  • No need to commit to further steps.
  • Maintain the focus on you and your needs.
  • Decide a budget and stick to it, no surprises

Do you have Any Questions?

Ask Us Anything

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.

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