Business Plans for E-Commerce Retailers

Describe about the Business Plans for E-Commerce Retailers.

Business Plans

Candies E-commerce retailer business plan:  This plan was developed for Nature's Candy to create an e-commerce brand online through the use of laser-focused marketing and achieve a revenue growth to $319,000 in coming three years. Objectives of the business plan include creation of an icon brand, development of an efficient ecommerce website for selling homeopathic and naturopathic products, run a laser-focused marketing that gets more visitor to the website and develop an IT infrastructure for supporting ecommerce sales (Bplan, 2016).

Clothing E-commerce Retailer business plan: This plan was developed to create an online portal that allowed sales of creative outdoor clothing to women directly by eliminating the middlemen between the brand and buyers. The business does not keep inventory but the stocks are provided as per the forecasted demands. The company Liquid Culture was founded by Larry Wilson and Maggie Grange some 15 years back. Objectives of the plan include create an entertaining website for women, use a strong advertising campaign to be run using traditional media vehicles like magazines, establish strong relationships with vendors to enable fast deliveries after receiving orders, and get the talented staff for the routine work in business (Bplans, 2016).

Strong Components

Table 1: Business Plan Strength

Candies E-commerce retailer business plan	Clothing E-commerce Retailer business plan
Business Plan objectives are very clear and identify what a company would aim to achieve.  These can be used for determining specific measures that can help in assessment of the actual implementation of the plan	The segmentation of the target market is done sufficiently with two major customer segments identified based on the age including women of age between 16 and 25 and women of age between 26 and 40. Specific strategies that would be used for approaching each of the segments are also identified.
The industry has been critically analysed in the business plan to understand how and what things work in the industry.  A section of the plan includes examples of some of the competitors that are covered to understand their strengths in market and how their customers are.	The unique selling proposition of having creative products that are displayed in a very attractive way over a website that is considered most fashionable and allow customers to check how the clothes would fit them.
The milestones of the establishment are clearly identified beginning with development of business plan, setting up of the office, completion of website development and hiring of individuals. These define how the plan would be executed in a specific sequence and thus, after every milestone achieved, a review may be taken to understand how well the plan was executed.	A break even analysis is being done to understand how and when the company would start to make profits after the business plan is executed. This is expected to be achieved  by the seventh month.

Weak Components

Table 2: Business Plan Weaknesses

Candies E-commerce retailer business plan	Clothing E-commerce Retailer business plan
The market segmentation is not very clear and the same is only divided into baby boomers and others.  Information about how consumers of the product different in their nature and how they would be approached differently are not provided in the business plan	Objectives of the business plan are not identified appropriately. Though, there are success criteria discussed but this does not include mention of specific aims of the company
There is no specific unique selling proposition of the ecommerce portal except that it identified ease of website usage and customer service as the strengths but these are commonly used approaches taken by almost all ecommerce providers who promise these benefits to their customers.	The number of human resource people identified are very few and thus, execution of the extensive plan by these people may be challenging
Break even analysis assumed a linear straight increase in revenues which may not be practically possible and variations may be there	There are no marketing strategies identified except the provisions of discounts.

Improvement suggestions

For  Candies E-commerce retailer business plan, some improvements suggested include:

The market segmentation may be made more clear by understanding the target consumers considering their ages, gender, behaviour, occupation and other such characteristics.

Unique selling proposition may not be something that is common to all ecommerce vendors in the same space but some unique proposition that is not already taken by other brands may be identified.

A personnel or human resource management part may also be added to the business plan to understand how human resources would be used

For Clothing E-commerce Retailer business plan, some improvements suggested include:

Objectives that a business plan may be used to achieve can be clarified in the plan.

A coverage of business ratios may be added to understand the impact of business plan on company's financial position.

A marketing plan may be developed for developing promotional plans for the business.

Business Planning Lessons

Some of the lessons can be learnt from this comparison of business plans including:

When business plan identified objectives of the plan clearly, it is easy to monitor progress and determine success criteria

Market segmentation is an important thing to consider it helps better in developing marketing plans.

References

Bplan. (2016, August 8). E-commerce Retailer Business Plan. Retrieved August 13, 2016, from BPlans: http://www.bplans.com/e-commerce_retailer_business_plan/executive_summary_fc.php

Bplans. (2016, August 13). Clothing E-commerce Site Business Plan. Retrieved from BPlans: http://www.bplans.com/clothing_e-commerce_site_business_plan/executive_summary_fc.php