Children's Website Business Plan

The primary InteliChild.com strategy is to build an impressive destination website. The marketing of the site will be built around the core value that the site will offer. Although our competition has built a simple store for ordering the product, the InteliChild.com site will be reviewed by Web award companies as a great destination. We will build our revenue and market share around this traffic.

Our business model is based on the sales of our products over the website. Because the site is also intended to increase brand equity and awareness, we are building for high traffic. Our model requires giving users an excellent free experience and to develop trust to increase sell-through. We plan to lose money for at least three years while we build traffic and develop our position for the long-term future.

The traffic forecast is based on increasing sessions, increasing page views per session, and increasing orders per session.  The bottom line called “sell-through” is the overall dollars in order per user session, an important indicator that should be increasing over time.

Website Marketing Strategy

Our first class design and product quality are critical to our positioning as a dot-com company – we should be the best reviewed website in our category, and that will become the key to future sales. In the past, our design work and marketing has not matched our better-funded competitor. However, the core experience for the children has always been better, and with a new design team and a round of financing, the InteliChild.com company is ready to grow with the market. InteliChild.com will distinguish itself from its competitor as a full learning center, rather than just a store front.

Development Requirements

Of course the development needs to match the overall business strategy as explained in the rest of the plan.  This has to be an excellent site or we just haven’t implemented.  That involves both front-end and back-end strategies, as explained in the following topics.

Front End
Because InteliChild.com’s target customers are all affluent, we have the luxury of using the latest technologies to impress the visitors with excellent design and animation. We plan to release the site entirely in Shockwave™ format as almost 90% of our visitors will already have it installed.

We will carry on the colorful and extremely well branded design of our company literature and logo – the decisions on basic aesthetics will not get in the way. The site will have a colorful and intelligent design, taking the ad campaign and product art into an interactive medium on the Web.

Back End
The InteliChild.com e-commerce site will be built on a three-tier structure. Driven by SQL™ servers and an IIS™ Web server backed with bandwidth, the site will be coded mostly in ColdFusion™ and ASP™. We will be taking our registration databases live to be able to email updates on products and the website to customers. We will offer customers the option to take themselves out of the list.

The purchase arena will require a Verisign™ certificate and a Cybercash™ connection. That will begin immediately because dealing with Cybercash™ can sometimes be a lengthy process.

The administrative arena will be hosted on mirror servers that query to the live databases for migration into local databases. This server is hidden from Internet traffic and kept under high security even within the company.

The entire set-up will be somewhat costly. We will need five servers, two for in-house reasons, and three for Web hosting reasons. Two of the Web host servers will be serving traffic through ColdFusion™ and ASP™ in cluster, and the third will be a dedicated SQL™ server.