Sporting Goods Retail Store Business Plan

Sportsuchtig has an existing Website that has been generating $1.3 million in sales the last 2 years. However, we believe that a user interface redesign would generate significantly more revenue. According to market research from the Gartner Group, more than 50% of Web sales are lost because visitors can’t find the content they’re looking for. Another study by usability consultants Creative Good estimated that improving the customer experience increases the number of buyers by 40% and increases overall order size by 10%. We plan to redesign and implement a new website in year 1.

The new site will be designed and coded with internet marketing optimization at the forefront of requirements. The basis for our Website marketing strategy is to utilize search engine optimization, keyword density, direct navigation, targeted link popularity and systematic submissions. It is critical to sales growth that the website gains and maintains a high search engine placement. A full website marketing plan will be developed and implemented.

The website is a primary sales channel for us and is critical to the sales goals of the company. We will implement the new site to showcase the product offerings and provide technical information and assistance to help the customer in their product selection. To further show off its expertise, the website will provide a resources area, offering articles, research, product information and website links of interest to its customers.

The website will mirror the image and branding elements showcased in the retail store and at the same time, keep up with the latest trends in user interface design. The key to the website strategy will be combining a well designed front-end, an excellent and fast shopping cart experience, and a back-end capable of capturing “hits” and customer data for use in future marketing endeavors.

6.1 Website Marketing Strategy

The basis for our website marketing strategy is to utilize search engine optimization, keyword density, direct navigation, targeted link popularity and systematic submissions. Our Website marketing strategy will adhere to each search engine’s no-Spam policies, while generating highly-qualified web traffic. We believe a successful marketing system is much more than simply optimizing our website to be search-engine friendly. The system should also provide support for other strategies, such as link popularity, site design and content, the “stickiness” of our site, consistent search engine submissions, and ethical marketing practices.

It is extremely important to gain and maintain a high search engine placement. A December 2002 study by DoubleClick revealed that people prefer to use search engines almost 2 to 1 over any other source to find products and services on the Internet. 85% of all searches on the internet start on search engines.

In addition, we will implement the following mechanisms to make our website URL and domain name visible and effective:

• We will place our Web address on every form of literature that goes out of our business, such as letterhead, business cards, envelopes, invoices, payments, etc.
• We will place our Web address in all print advertising, such as newspaper ads, magazine ads, professional trade magazines, etc.
• Our internet Web address will be part of our on-hold or answering systems for both the internet 800 numbers and the retail store phone.
• Electronic advertisements such as radio ads will feature our Web address.
• We will develop our new website from inception, and modify the existing one as practical, with Web marketing as a key objective. There are huge advantages to developing the site with marketing in mind. Position of keyword phrases in the text, the alt tag description, the titles of the pages, the page URL, and Meta Tags in the heading area all have a role to play.
• We will avoid using frames on our website because many browsers do not support frames and many search engines do not rank sites with frames very high.
• Although we need pictures to display our many products, we will try to avoid putting too many graphics on a page, so we don’t reduce the page load time to a crawl. If a site does not start to download within 8 seconds a prospective customer will go to another site, and customers with dial-up links find sites with too many images make it painfully slow to load pages.

6.2 Development Requirements

A full development plan will be generated as documented in the milestones. Costs that Sportsuchtig will expect to incur with development of its new website include:

Development Costs

• User interface design – $3,000.
• Site development and testing – $6,000.
• Site Implementation – $1,000.

This development will be outsourced.

Ongoing Costs

• Website name registration – $70 per year.
• Site Hosting – $30 or less per month.
• Site design changes, updates and maintenance are considered part of Marketing.