e-Commerce Site: Business Plan
Phase Five – Maintenance

If you have worked through the earlier stages of developing a business plan for your e-Commerce site, then you are ready to tackle the question of maintenance. Getting your site started, up and running, and seen by potential customers must be followed up by a plan to keep your online business going.

Presented here are a few maintenance concepts for your e-Commerce site.

Website Maintenance
Now that your e-Commerce site is up, you don’t ever have to mess with the actual coding of it again. Right? Not a chance. There will be continual updates necessary to your site as you learn what is working for customers and what isn’t. There are tracking services and programs that will tell you how a user navigates your site and perhaps which pages hardly get visited at all. They can also tell you how many people are visiting your e-Commerce site at given intervals. All of this information can lead you to make changes to your website.

Other changes that may be made more often are featuring certain items, offering discounts online, and indicating the items that are on backorder. All of these require regular maintenance and updating of your e-Commerce site.

Product Growth
Once you determine what customers are purchasing on your e-Commerce site, you may want to give consideration to expanding the variety of products your website offers. This may come when you get a better feel of the volume of orders you are filling, and it may also be a matter of waiting until you have enough revenue built up to reinvest in more products. Either way, keeping your inventory updated and offering the right products for your marketing is an ongoing maintenance task for your e-Commerce site.

While product growth may be your goal, there may also come a time when you want to drop an item because of the low sales it generates. This is another form of maintenance where you continually evaluate the products that are selling and adjust your product line as necessary.

Customer Retention
Once you get someone to make a purchase from your e-Commerce site, how do you plan to make that consumer a repeat customer? While this may fall under your marketing plan as well, keeping customers coming back for future purchases is also a maintenance aspect of your e-Commerce site. Follow up emails, regular newsletters, and personalized discounts are just a few methods used to try and keep customers. Repeat business is crucial to the success of your e-Commerce site, so it wise to give this phase of your business plan a lot of thought and research.

Continued Marketing
Continued marketing is also important to the maintenance phase of your e-Commerce site business plan. Repeat customers are valuable to your business, but your plan also needs to account for generating as much new traffic as possible. There are services and programs that will gather information on which of your marketing plans are bringing about new traffic, and which ones may not be worth the money. Keeping a dynamic marketing plan will help your e-Commerce site grow.