Students will create their own e-commerce store through first completing a situational analysis to determine a GAP in the market and an opportunity to launch and e-commerce store.

Students will work with either, Shopify, WIX, BigCommerce or any other Software as Service Platform to launch a complete store with a complete strategy, tactics (Marketing Plan, SEO Plan, PPC Plan, Content Plan, and Social Media Plan) with series of objectives (long-term, short- term objectives to determine key performance indicators) to measure tactics success.

Students will experience the building of an appealing store catalogue, customizing website, and creating additional website content. Students should include at least the following in their new e-commerce store:

• Products
• Homepage and Theme
• Additional Website Content

Assignment #1 – SOS – Situation – Objectives – Strategy (5%)

• Completion of multiple analysis (Trends, SWOT, TOWS, GAP Analysis) to identify value proposition and develop key business model for your e-commerce store.
• Development of long-term goals – Vision Statement (Why?) – Mission Statement (How?) and short-term SMART objectives to achieve your mission and leading to development of KPIs to measure in the Control section of this rubric
• Setting the strategy through identifying Segments, Target Markets and setting objectives to position your offering – Sequence – Trust – Try – Buy; Integration – CRM – Database; Targeting and Segmentation

Assignment #2 – TAC – Tactics – Action – Control (15%)

• Establishing a marketing plan – 5Ps (People, Product, Price, Place, & Promotion (Communications Plan); Content Plan, and Social Media Strategy
• Add several products. For each product, include images and detailed product description that will appeal to the target customer. For at least one of the products, create variants such as size or colour. Create at least two collections and assign all products into your collections. Enable search by collections. Tag your products.
• Apply a free theme. Select appealing background colours and text colours that are easy to read. Include images and content on all site pages – the content should appeal to the target customer. Set up the site’s navigation: create a top navigation bar, and a footer navigation menu with all key links on the bar. Make your navigation both laptop and mobile phone friendly. Create an announcement bar.
• Execute the tactics and test the results to determine if it is working

• Optimize your website (e.g. home page, about page…) and all product pages for SEO. Measure your progress and adjust the plan to meet your goals – Data, Analytics, KPIs, UX, Satisfaction surveys, dashboards