Office Furniture Store Business Plan

The WorkChairs’ website will be more than just a brochure for our local business, it will be a huge sales channel to the online world.

The focus of our site will be a combination of a store for our products and an ergonomic educational resource.

The store section of our site will be a very clean design that is similar to most e-commerce sites so users are familiar with the way things work. We’ll provide lots of information about our products and how they help solve people’s problems. We’ll also make it very clear to users how they can contact us for individual sales support and customer service. We think users might need some hand holding to choose the right product.

The ergonomic information section of our site will provide information about all the most common health problems caused by office working conditions. It will outline the health problems, the causes, and provide solutions in the form of positioning and posture, as well as links to products that can be purchased. We feel this section of our site will validate WorkChairs as experts in the field, and provide incentive for other websites to link to our website.

6.1 Website Marketing Strategy

Our overall online marketing strategy falls into the following strategies:

• Search Engines – We will be paying for listings in the paid inclusion engines as well as submitting to free engines like Google. Peter Wilson is an expert in this field and he will be designing our site from the start to have keywords built into the copy and give the site an overall search-engine friendly design.
• Pay-per-click Advertising – We’ll have a limited monthly budget for pay-per-click advertising on Google and Overture for selected targeted ergonomic keywords that fit our products. We will monitor our return on investment closely here to make sure we’re profitable with this advertising.
• Link-building Campaign – The educational aspect of our site along with our resources section will allow us to get links from other sites either through the quality of our content or in a link exchange manner. We will try to get links from good sites in ergonomics, furniture, office supplies, and other related areas.
• Affiliate Program – We will have an affiliate program that pays other websites 10% for sales that they refer to our website. This will get us more links, and provide incentive for other sites to market our products to their visitors.
• Word of Mouth – Our site will be set up so that’s it’s easy for visitors to send pages of our site to their friends and co-workers. We also hope their satisfaction with our products will lead them to tell others about us.

6.2 Development Requirements

The development of the WorkChairs website will start on January 1st of 2002. The estimated finish date of the website will be February 15, 2002. Peter Wilson will be developing all aspects of the website.

• Front End – The front end of the website is the graphic user design and interface that will be designed by Peter Wilson. The design will be simple with bland colors and feature a similar interface of popular e-commerce websites.
• Back End – The back end of our system is also being developed by Peter Wilson. It will feature a mySQL database and will use PHP as the programming language for the site logic. The e-commerce package is in PHP and is a combination of a base package and custom programming by Peter Wilson. The advantage of this setup is that we can customize it, it’s free, and it’s extremely fast. The product information will be stored in the database.
• Administration – It will be easy to add and edit content and product information on the website due to the administrative interface programmed by Peter Wilson. Both Jake and Lisa Wilson will be able to add/edit/delete products and content at any time.
• Future Development – As an employee of WorkChairs, Peter will be working part-time developing new features for the website and marketing it online.