Sample Business Plan (Doc)

Retail Company Business Plan
Contents
Executive summary....................................................................................................................2
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Organizational Background.......................................................................................................2
Efficiency and profitability........................................................................................................3
Shoppers experience...................................................................................................................5
System architecture....................................................................................................................7
Software applications...............................................................................................................11
Payment option.........................................................................................................................12
Security considerations............................................................................................................15
Conclusions..............................................................................................................................16
References................................................................................................................................17

Executive summary
This business plan has been written for a clothing retail organization that wants to get in to
the online space with an ecommerce website that would be used for making sales. The
website would be mobile responsive so that customers can also access website and make
purchases online. The plan describes the architecture of the recommended solution for the
development of this website, suggests the features to be included and the applications to be
installed on the website. The report also includes considerations of security, payment options,
user experience, efficiency, and profitability.
The objective of the website to offer latest designs to the customers through the ecommerce
portal at affordable prices and make the shopping experience rich enough. The website uses
WordPress as the Content management system over which the website would be developed
and the key features it would have on the portal include custom search, payment gateway,
chat feature for service, and social media integration.
Introduction
This business plan is written for a retail company that is going to build an ecommerce website
to sell clothing products. This website should be mobile responsive such that the customers of
the company should be able to review products and make purchases through the use of their
mobiles. The report includes details of development of experience for the customer, system
architecture of the website, software applications that would be used for the development and
the security considerations of the same (Pandya and Dholakia, 2005).
Organizational Background
The organization is a small retailer for clothing which takes supplies of clothes from the local
suppliers and sells them to the customers in the offline and online space. The current sales of
the company is happening through a boutique and social media platforms like Facebook
groups and WhatsApp groups. The company is planning to build an ecommerce store. Value
proposition of the company is to provide low cost clothing products of good quality directly
taken from manufacturers to reach to customers with wide and new variety of latest designs.
Primary objectives of the website is to provide apparels with latest designs at good prices and
a good buying experience (Brohi et al., 2016).

The website would work on the business to customer model such that the products posted
online would be purchased by the end consumers directly and once ordered; the supplier
would directly dispatch the goods to the customers place. At the back end the company would
be connected to the suppliers who would be listing their products online against which the
retail would deduct a margin from the product price at the time of purchase such that the
margin amount gets deposited in the company’s account while remaining amount is
transferred to the supplier.
Efficiency and profitability
With the use of more and more advanced technologies, the demands from the supply chain
system is also increasing and the customers are expecting better levels of services than ever
before while keeping the costs low at the same time. However, this can add pressure to the
retail organization who has to establish a balance between a good quality of products,
effective services and low prices of merchandize that is going to be sold online. Providing
services and generating profits can be conflicting situations and have to be well balanced by a
retailer.
On a clothing retail website, customers order products of different colour, size, material,
design, and prices but before doing that they need to go through a long process of search in
which the customer needs to be engaged so that he or she does not leave the website without
adding any items to the cart. Even after adding items to track, the customer can decide to not
make a purchase and leave the website, in which case, the company would have a reminder
feature that would allow sending of automatic emails to the users who have added products in
the cart but have not purchases. This would push the customers towards completing the
buying process on the website.
There can also be returns from the customers which would add to the cost to the company if
handled by the organization itself which would be the case with the retailer. While the total
cost of the return would be borne by the supplier, the company would still have to arrange for
a person to collect the return material and this person has to be supported by an
administrative staff to initiate refund. To remain efficient in this process, the company would
need to reduce the cost of return order handling as much as possible. The website would thus
give this provision by matching the return orders with the nearby orders placed by the
customers so that the sales person who is responsible for getting the order back from the
customer and also deliver one order in the nearby area can be used to complete both the tasks

which would save both on the time and money. This would need a real time data integration
on the website such that as soon as the return is initiated, the process of matching the other
orders begin. The return orders an affect the profitability and thus, the website analytics
would be used to understand the customer preferences so that it can be ensured that the return
order are minimized. For this, the company would ensure to put the true image of the cloth as
well as provide all necessary details like size, colour, style, and material information.
The company needs to also boost the efficiency of its ecommerce website if it has to get the
best results from it. For this, the company needs to keep evaluating its efficiency and take
steps for improvement. For the evaluation of the website, certain metrics can be used that
would be used for reflecting upon website performance, usability, design, security, content
updates, user transaction, and web technologies used. Website design, performance and
traffic are the most important metrics that are used for evaluation of the website.
Design: Information, graphics, navigation, and user experience form th components of the
design of a website. Website design can be assessed using a Web Analysis tool such as
Maxamine that would assess the design of the website on the basis of factors like site
architecture, page performance, page formatting, text elements, text formats, link formats,
link elements, graphic elements, and graphics formats.
Performance: The performance of the website can be measured using response time of the
website pages. At the time of peak load, the performance of the website can reduce as the
website would have more load to handle and as a result the reponse time of the website would
increase. If this response time is very long the customer would start to think that the page ins
unresponsive and would leave the website. Thus, the page response time is very important
factor of consideration when thinking of user experience. Page response time is affected by
the page size and bandwidth between ISP and the end user. While bandwidth used by the
customer cannot be controlled, the page size can be, Higher is the size of the page, longer
would be the response time and thus, the website needs to have the optimization of the pages
so that they are of smaller size when loaded.
Website Traffic: Traffic on the website is yet another important metric for the website
performance. The study of traffic includes recording of unique visits, page hits, loyalty, and
time spent. Page hits and unique visits are usually used for assessing the website traffic
(cinca, et al., 2005).