There are many howtos, best practices, top 10 (or more) tips and techniques, and common sense advice out there on how you should develop your online business strategy.

I personally read a lot of them myself, often just to make sure that my assumptions are correct or just to see if there is anything new I could learn from them. My perspective though is that of an analyst and a consultant; of someone who needs to gather knowledge in order to adapt it to a specific context and be creative with it.

As with statistics, best practices and insightful advice are good indicators and they bring perspective to a situation. They often show the way and warn for pitfalls. Do they however draw a clear map of what everyone could or should follow?

There are many questions that you can ask yourselves about what is best in order to thrive in our global and competitive online day and age. Here are a few of them that you might have contemplated:

Is it to have the right tools or is it to have the right tool box with some tools you might not use? If you want to build a business plan, do you just find a business model that you can replicate or maybe adapt or do you create something completely different?

Should you: send newsletters, enable reviews and comments, post videos, have 360° views of your products, have click-to-call, be Digg-ed, use Twitter, have a blog, RSS feeds, do integrated marketing, participate in online social networks, take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds (WOC), exploit word of mouth (WOM), find your niche in the Long Tail, etc.?

In a world where the list of web features and their possibilities are endless, which ones to chose from and for what purpose? And what about all those marketing concepts and marketing trends? Are they just fads or are they relevant to long term planning? And what if you want to be creative and find your edge? Can you use these tools and models or should you design new ones?

I raise all these questions because I want to demonstrate how challenging it can be to choose a path, a business model, or a technology in order to be and to stay competitive in business. This doesn’t only apply to the online world. Just think about globalization and outsourcing and you will find yourself in the same maze of questions and doubts.

At the end of the day, it really all comes down to… YOU! And therefore there are essential questions that you should consider first:

What makes you and your business unique? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What makes you different from your competition? How have you adapted up to now to be successful? What makes your business processes and your corporate culture so unique?

Whether you have all the answers to these questions or not, they are what defines your uniqueness. And as for the individuals who run them, all businesses are uniquely different because of their history, their values and management styles.

So in my opinion, which is open for debate, building the best eCommerce strategy in the world requires to understand and leverage your uniqueness.

Where does this leave you? I admit that this statement doesn’t really help you per say. You might even feel more lost than when you started reading this post. And that’s OK because my intent is to warn you against the wide spread “miracle solution” and “technology first” approaches to defining an online business strategy.

There is a rational and widespread approach to taking the right first steps in defining a business strategy. The first stage of this process is referred to as Business Analysis and it helps organizations understand the benefits of a given new process, policy or technology.

As defined in Wikipedia:

“Business analysis [...] focuses on identifying requirements in the context of helping organizations to achieve strategic goals through internal changes to organizational capabilities, including changes to policies, processes, and information systems”

This approach makes sure that one understands where the organization comes from, where it wants to go and how it can measure its success in the implementation of a new strategy.

I strongly recommend that you think your eCommerce strategy through and have a roadmap that fulfills your business goals before you start investing in any type of technology. Only then will you be able to understand and measure the benefits of taking your business online.

Bookmark to: