Whether you’re launching a brand new ecommerce site or refreshing an existing one, writing a website brief can feel daunting.
Planning to build a new site or redesign an existing one is no mean feat! But before you enlist the help of the professionals, you’ll need to absolutely nail down your ecommerce website brief to ensure you’ll achieve the site of your dreams. A robust brief sets the tone for your entire website project so taking the time to think deeply and strategically about your goals and objectives will stand you in good stead. It helps your digital agency understand your goals, define your scope and deliver a site that looks amazing and performs even better. So, what should your ecommerce brief include? Here’s our no-nonsense guide to writing a killer brief that gives your agency everything they need to bring your vision to life. Without further ado, let’s dive right in!
What is an ecommerce website brief?
Put simply, an ecommerce website brief is a roadmap to achieving your perfect website. It should outline your brand goals, design preferences, functionality requirements, bespoke features and technical details, all in one place to ensure that every stakeholder is on the same page. The process of writing an ecommerce brief is essential to ensuring a successful web design project as it helps you to think about the things you may not have even considered yet. A good brief helps to:
- Set clear expectations from day one
- Ensure all stakeholders are singing from the same hymn sheet
- Avoid unnecessary back-and-forth
- Save time and money in the long run
- Ensure your business goals align with functionality & feature requests
- Keep your project on time and on budget
The more information you can provide within your brief, the more an agency has to inspire and inform their designs. That being said, a good partnership is always collaborative so don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers, with the help of ecommerce experts, you’ll be able to figure it out along the way.
Here’s what to include in your ecommerce website brief:
1. Company Overview
One of the most commonly overlooked aspects when writing an ecommerce website brief is summarising your business and background. But it’s often the most important! Ensure that you provide your web design agency with a introduction to your business, answering questions such as: Who are you? What do you sell? What are your core brand values? What’s your unique edge or USPs? The deeper your agency understands your business and brand, the better they can design your website to convert and drive sales. Ensure you include:
- Business name & industry sector
- Overview of product catalogue
- Core mission, brand values, story and background
- Company size & team structure (this will help agencies to offer unique functionality to aid operational efficiency)
- Key competitors & aspirational brands
- Differentiators & USPs
2. Website Objectives
Outlining your key business objectives for your new website is absolutely essential. An agency needs to understand your primary goals for any given project so think about questions such as: Why are you starting this project now? What are your primary business objectives? Is your business going through a transition period? Some examples of website objectives include:
- Replatforming from WooCommerce to Shopify to support your scaling business
- Boosting the functionality of your website to support new business ventures such as offering a new subscription service
- Enhancing the operational efficiency of your business to boost profitability and requiring a streamlined backend ecommerce experience to support this
- Redesigning an outdated website to improve mobile experience and responsiveness
- Rebranding your business
3. Target Audience
Providing information about your target audience, ideal customer persona and existing customers is paramount to creating a new website that resonates with your desired audience. If you have already researched your customer personas, mapped your customer journey and undertaken market research, including this information in your website brief could make a huge difference to the success of your new ecommerce site. If your agency understands who your customers are, what they’re buying, what drives them to convert and what frustrates them most about your existing online shopping experience, they’ll be able to design a site that appeals to your audience and drives them to checkout. Think about your audience and provide information such as:
- Demographics & behaviour patterns
- Buying habits, customer motivation & what they love
- Pain-points, friction points within your site & common frustrations
- How customers find you online
4. Required Functionality & Features
Now it’s time to get to the nitty gritty! While this shouldn’t be an exhaustive list of every, single, feature and element of functionality you want on your site, it’s a chance to share any big ideas you’ve got along with what your website fundamentally needs to do to be a success. Provide enough information here that gives your agency an idea of what you need so they can provide and develop the best possible solutions for your requirements. Here are some examples of what you might want to include here:
- Wishlist or back-in-stock alerts
- Integrations with your existing ERP or CRM systems
- Click & Collect
- Subscription functionality
- Room visualiser tool
- Bespoke calculator tool
5. Content & Assets
Now you’ve laid the foundations of your ecommerce website brief, it’s time to get a little more logistical. Whether you’re redesigning an existing website or starting from scratch, one thing’s for sure, you’ll need to consider content. All too often, this gets overlooked by many businesses but considering who is writing or providing your content from the outset is key to a smooth-running website build. Think about and outline the following:
- Do you have existing content that needs migrating?
- Do you need content writing assistance?
- Who will be providing product photographs?
- Will your team be populating the website or is this a service you need?
6. If this is a redesign, what’s working and what’s not?
If you’re redesigning your existing ecommerce website, now’s the time to deep-dive into what is working on your site and what isn’t. Spend time going through each element of your website with your team to get multiple opinions and even reach out to loyal customers to get their feedback to ensure you’re not in an echo chamber. Get really clear on what elements of the site you love and absolutely must keep and what needs to go. Consider the following aspects:
- Ecommerce platform: is it working? What’s going well? What’s not?
- Page speed, performance, Core Web Vitals: Are you seeing any issues? Is there room for improvement or is everything great?
- SEO: How is your organic visibility? Are you ranking within search engines? Could this be improved?
- Analytics: Look at your conversions, traffic data and bounce rates. Is there anything glaring out to you that needs to be improved?
7. Success Metrics
Finally, your web agency must understand your key success metrics to ensure they can do everything in their power to craft a website that exceeds your expectations. Think about how you’ll gauge whether or not your new website has achieved your goals. What metrics matter the most to you? Examples of useful success metrics could include:
- Increased conversion rates
- Boost in mobile orders
- Growth in organic traffic
- Decrease in bounce rate
- Improved Core Web Vitals
While writing an ecommerce brief may feel like a hurdle you need to cross before diving straight in to designing your new site, it’s absolutely essential for setting the foundation of a brilliant ecommerce website. If you want a site that looks great, aligns with your brand identity and offers unique functionality that captures your audience’s attention and boost sales, we’d highly recommend taking the time to write a website brief.
If you’re ready to level up your ecommerce website, we’re all ears! Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to build an outstanding ecommerce website together.
