E-Commerce Project Management: A Guide for Fast-Growing Businesses

The recent global pandemic has had a massive impact on the e-commerce sector, with online shopping becoming an important part of our everyday lives. Due to the change in shopping trends during COVID-19, the e-commerce industry has flourished during the last two years.

To start an e-commerce business, the first and foremost step is employing effective e-commerce project management practices. Without effective project management techniques, it is nearly impossible to launch and grow an e-commerce business.

Fast-growing businesses are always looking for scalability in an e-commerce store or website. For such businesses, we have compiled the following guidelines to plan your e-commerce project wisely:

Choose a Project Management Approach

The first step toward successful project management of an e-commerce website or online store is to choose the right methodology. It is important to choose a project management approach that best suits your project needs and helps in implementing the project in the most effective ways. Following are the five different project management approaches that top web and mobile development companies follow in all IT-related projects:

Agile – the product is divided into small parts and developed in iterations

Scrum – development process is divided into weekly sprints delivered through small, cross-functional, and self-managing teams

Kanban – Increasing visibility of work-in-progress and limiting multi-tasking to improve quality of product delivery and decrease delivery time

Lean – eliminating waste during the project timeline by streamlining all processes

Waterfall – first planning the complete project, allocating resources, and then executing the project phase-by-phase

Draft a Project Plan Wisely

When creating a complete project plan, an e-commerce project manager must know the goals and objectives of the e-commerce website or online store, why it is needed, and what is expected from the project. For in-house development, the project managers also consider the feasibility of in-house development and whether they have enough resources and expertise to develop such a system.

Budget Analysis

After the project goals and objectives are well laid out, the e-commerce project manager consults with the financial managers or owner with budget allocation. During this phase, the complete project timeline is considered along with hourly rates of developers in case it’s outsourced, and for in-house development, the salaries, maintenance cost, overhead expenses, and other related costs are also considered.

Competition Analysis

An e-commerce project manager must research all the competitors in the same niche. List down all the good points of your competitors and consider the services which bring the most value to the clients. You must also consider the platform they have used to build their online store and check the feasibility of your project concerning those platforms.

Requirements Specification

The project manager gathers all the financial and business requirements. This also includes specifying the expected features of the e-commerce website, payment modes, order fulfilments, delivery methods, and logistics partners.

Set Milestones and Begin with SDLC

The next step in building a fast-growing e-commerce platform is setting the milestones and breaking the project into smaller tasks. The project manager then assigns the tasks to team members and provides a timeline for each task. This sets off the software development lifecycle (SDLC), which works in a loop.

Outsource e-Commerce Projects to Top e-Commerce Development Companies

In-house development usually takes more like and consumes more resources resulting in exceeding the budget. Many times, the inexperienced in-house team also fails to meet the project expectation. Instead, businesses should opt for outsourcing the project to top e-commerce development companies that have expert developers. This helps in cutting down costs and timely completion of the project.

Xpeer helps businesses hire top e-commerce developers by maintaining a huge database of the best website and mobile development companies and top WordPress, .net, Shopify, magneto, and PHP development companies.

Visit Xpeer to find out more about our services.