I have worked on, helped build, consulted on and run marketing campaigns for a lot of ecommerce sites. The first ever ecommerce site I worked on was in 1996, (www.carphonewarehouse.co.uk, I was a developer on it). However, I have never actually built and run my own ecommerce site.

That’s changing.

About 2 weeks ago I kicked off a project to build my own site. As you can tell by the title, it’s built on Magento. This is not an endorsement of Magento as the best shopping cart. I’ve always said to pick the best cart to meet your needs. For the majority of people Magento is not the best cart. For my particular needs, I believe it is. Let’s see in 6 months time if I’m cursing Magento

My role in the project is business owner/project manager. What I’ve done so far:

• Written a functional specification.
• Found and briefed an experienced Magento developer who I believe it a good match to my needs.
• Hired a social media strategist to create a social media strategy. That’s already been done. It’s someone I’ve worked with before (she helped with some of the social media for this site a while back).
• Written a content brief. For me, high quality content is one of the, if not the, most important type of marketing. I’ve found one writer and am in talks with a few more.
• Created an information architecture. I did this myself as it’s relatively straight forward and I have IA experience. I did hire an IA consultant to review my work. She did a good job and added to and refined my thinking.
• Started work on a customer service plan. Still a way to go on this, early days.
• Found a magento template I liked. I bought it because I really liked the structure/layout. I didn’t like the colours and images, so I have found and briefed a designer to just work on the style elements. Once done, my programmers will integrate it.
• I haven’t done a specific marketing plan. I’m leading with social media and content as the primary marketing channels. I’ll also do some SEO but I have a lot of experience with SEO so that’s fine, don’t need a detailed plan for that. I will probably also do a little PPC, but for reasons I won’t get into now I don’t expect to do a lot of that.

So that’s where I’m up to so far. I don’t endorse this as the best way to run a project, or even a good way. A lot of it is very much tailored to me and my experience. For example, I have a lot of experience managing developers. For someone with less experience I would suggest a more detailed plan than I’ve done. There’s definitely bits I’m winging.

I’ve also done a lot of stuff related to legal, suppliers, financial structures, fulfilment, etc, but I won’t be covering that in this blog as that is all very specific to my business and not applicable to anyone else. At this point I don’t plan to disclose the site, but I might change my mind.

Look for rather infrequent updates on this project. It’s keeping me very busy so not a lot of time. Also working on a major upgrade to this site, the biggest single upgrade in a few years. Already got a stable beta version, just sorting out some data issues. It’ll be live in 2 weeks at most.