Moving to e-commerce: a realistic 90-day plan
Opening the store is the easy part; building the operation behind it is the work. A realistic three-month plan for going online.
The most common mistake in moving to e-commerce is treating the job as "building a site". The site is the easiest part. What's hard is what happens after an order lands.
Here is a realistic three-month plan. The order matters: each month builds on the one before.
Month 1 — Catalogue and operations
No code gets written this month.
Map the catalogue. How many products, how many variants (colour, size, dimension), does each variant have its own stock code? A messy catalogue is the most expensive thing to fix later.
Write down the pricing logic. One price, dealer pricing, quantity discounts, how campaigns work.
Draw the post-order flow. An order lands — then what? Who sees it, where does stock come off, how is the invoice issued, where does the shipping label come from, how is a return handled?
Choosing a platform before these three are settled is premature.
Product photography and copy. Usually the item that delays everything. If it doesn't start this month, it sets the launch date.
Month 2 — Setup and integration
Platform choice. If you sell a standard catalogue, building on an existing platform is faster and cheaper. If you have dealer pricing, complex variants or workflows specific to your operation, a custom build costs less over time.
Payments. Merchant account applications can take weeks depending on the bank. Make it the first task of the month.
Shipping and invoicing integration. Labels generated and invoices issued automatically when an order lands. Done by hand you can handle a few orders a day; you can't handle thirty.
Accounting connection. If your package has an API, connect directly; if not, bridge over its export.
Month 3 — Testing, launch and measurement
Run a real order end to end. Buy something with your own card: payment, invoice, shipping, return. The problems this surfaces are most of the ones that would otherwise surface after launch.
Measure page speed. Product and category pages must open quickly on mobile; slowness is the number one reason visitors leave before the basket.
Set up analytics. Which product was viewed, added to basket, purchased. Without this you can't tell what's working.
Launch gradually. Rather than publishing everything on day one, start with one category. The first real orders always reveal something new.
Three common mistakes
Overestimating product count. Launching with your 50 best sellers and growing is far more manageable than launching with 2,000 products.
Leaving returns until later. When the first return arrives with no process in place, both the customer and the team struggle.
Launching a marketplace and your own store at once. They're separate operations. Get one working first.
Describe your catalogue and post-order flow and we can work out together whether a hosted platform or a custom build makes sense. E-commerce development.
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Tell us what you are trying to do. On the first call we will tell you whether we are the right fit, roughly how long it takes and how we would approach it. No sales pitch.
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