Mapping to Business Concerns

Make sure you can justify each decision you make about what services to provide and what purchases to make.
Each time you decide on a particular storyboard element, you should stop to ask exactly why you need it.
Additional business issues include ways to generate and determine demand for the site. as well as how to:

1. Record the customer's information.
2. Process the order accurately.
3. Ship the product.
4. Deal with customer feedback, including complaints.
5. Pre-sales inquiries and sales tracking.
6. Online sales support.
7. Building a sense of community with the customer, so that he or she is aware of the product's life cycle, new offerings, and upgrades.

Because an e-commerce site is available to anyone, you must consider how you will deal with the proceeds from transactions.
Some of these issues are shown in the SlideShow below.

Process mapping provides a structural analysis approach and a capability of delivering systematic outputs. But the effectiveness of process mapping is affected by how it is selected as the method of analysis, how it is planned and executed. Here are 4 common ways process improvement professionals go wrong with process mapping.

1. Process mapping is an analytical tool commonly applied by process improvement professionals.
2. By capturing real-world operation and reflecting it through a set of processes, they can, firstly, visualize the inputs, interactions, deliverables and parties involved in decision-making, and secondly, identify process inefficiencies, disjoints and improvement opportunities.
3. The effectiveness of process mapping, however, varies significantly based on the experience and observations of a writer.
4. On one procurement process reengineering project, for example, process mapping was appropriately applied to summarize core processes and identify non-value-added activities to facilitate improvement; but on another project, the consultants involved failed to capture the true scale of the operational processes in the organisation and the resultant improvement was unable to address the real underlying problems.

• Intellectual Property and the Web
  The Internet suggests to some that they can borrow ideas freely from any site. However, this is not the case. A properly implemented Web site represents an enormous amount of time and money that most companies want to protect. They do not appreciate close imitation.
  Intellectual property involves the use of existing material. This includes the copyright law and issues concerning plagiarism. Specifically, you cannot use information if your plan is to use both the content and the expression of another Web site.
• Support Staff:
  If you require any type of support services, such as a help desk or online sales support, you have to consider associated costs with employing support staff. An e-commerce site is a business, and thus requires that you plan for every eventuality. In the next lesson, you will learn about outsourcing.