This document has been written following a meeting between Tim Joyce and Ed Ross of Hoop and Simon Bent of The Crew Clothing Company, a fashion clothes retailer with 8 shops in the South of the UK and a catalogue/mail order service. Crew have approached a number of other website developers and have been disappointed by inflated prices. Hoop propose to build a site that will facilitate ecommerce while keeping the cost down by focusing on the essential areas of the site. The site is designed to generate sales, which will lead to increased confidence in the internet sales channel, and hopefully increased investment by Crew.
Crew have an existing site at www.crew-clothing.co.uk, this is not up to the job as:
This proposal seeks to address both of these issues.
The Crew Clothing Company is all about great style and top design. The design of the website will reflect this. Incorporated into the design will be room to add new features, allowing the site to expand easily. A Hoop designer will work closely with Crew in order to create the look required.
The following sites are some of the better clothing sales sites on line:
Of these sites, I feel that jcrew.com stands out, the look and feel of the Crew Clothing site will need to be at least as good as this.
The menu bar will consistently appear on each page. It allows navigation to all the main areas of the site and will consist of the following items:
This page will feature a Crew logo, and selected item(s) from the Spring 99 collection. The page will be designed to be flexible so that the items for the front page can be readily changed. The home page will have links to each of the sections of the Collection.
This is the Crew Clothing catalogue. The clothing sold can be broken down into a number of categories as used on the existing site.
These will be presented on a single page with thumbnail pictures for each section. The visitor will be able to click on a section and go to a more detailed page where the individual products are layed out. Whilst in the Collection pages, the list of categories will be consistently available.
This page will display up to about a dozen items of clothing, with short descriptions and thumbnail pictures. Visitors will be able to select an item in order to go to the detailed page. Additional navigation on this page will include back and forward buttons that allow the visitor to 'flick' through the catalogue.
This page will display a detailed description of the selected item, along with a reasonably large picture. The user will be able to select a Color, Size and Quantity to add to their shopping trolley. Additionally, they will be able to click through to a high resolution picture of the garment.
This page will give details of Crew's Corporate and team clothing. The page can include a high profile 'case-study', perhaps of the Silk Cut deal, with links to appropriate web sites. Visitors will be encouraged to get in touch with Crew to discuss Corporate Clothing deals in more detail.
This page will allow visitors to contact crew clothing in a variety of ways:
The shopping trolley is a simple list of items currently on the order. Users can remove items, change quantities, sizes, and colors, or proceed to the delivery page. They can also click on the individual items to see the detail for the item.
The delivery page allows customers to select a delivery mechanism, depending on where they live. Typical delivery options include:
This is where the customer will order and pay for their goods It consists of 2 pages:
When all the information has been gathered, the order will be placed in the database, and an email dispatched to Crew. Someone at Crew will then need to check the order and send a manual confirmation giving delivery times etc..
Hoop will supply an interface so that the database can be maintained online. This includes, adding and removing Customers and Products. When adding new clothes, Crew will need to upload pictures, but otherwise all dynamic data will be held in the database.
The site will be hosted in the US, as our experience has shown that 'state side' companies provide quicker connections, a higher quality of service, and better value for money. Additionally, 50% of the visitors to the site are likely to be Americans.
Crew will use the domain name www.crew-clothing.co.uk which has already been registered.
The single most important factor in making the site a success is how well it is promoted, both on and offline. We have tried to keep the development cost for the site down so that as much money as possible can be invested in online promotion. As with traditional promotion, the more time and effort spent pushing the message, the more effective the promotion is.
Online promotion can be broken down into 4 areas:
Online promotion is a complex area, so Hoop will provide a specialist consultant to advise Crew before a campaign is undertaken.
This is all about encouraging links to the site from people who might find the site useful. The promotion is generally carried out on an ongoing basis via email and newsgroup posting. Broadly it involves networking with customers, suppliers and companies in related businesses.
An essential first step in online promotion is to get the site registered with search engines, therefor Hoop propose an initial search engine 'push'. This involves the following:
The bulk submission, whilst great in principal, tends not to produce great results, mainly because the search engines covered do not themselves generate much traffic. Additionally bulk submission software is far from perfect.
An Affiliate program is designed to encourage to partners drive traffic to your site. This is achieved by offering a percentage of the sale (typically 10%) to the Affiliate. These partners will typically have their own site which generates significant amounts well qualified traffic and are looking to earn money from these visitors. Visitors to the Crew site who are referred by an affiliate will be tracked, and if they purchase clothes, the affiliate will get their 'commission'.
As with any distributed sales force, Affiliates require careful nurturing. It is not therefore proposed to run an affiliate program from launch, but rather wait as Crew acquire more online experience and can judge the value of an such a program.
Banner Advertising, although expensive, can achieve good results when targeted correctly. It involves buying advertising space on other websites where a Crew banner can be displayed. An alternative mechanism is a process called banner exchange, this involves putting banners on your site in exchange for banners appearing on other peoples sites. Banner exchange does not tend to be very effective for 2 reasons; you loose about twice as many people from your site as visit you through the exchange, and the visitors you get tend not to be well qualified.
A banner campaign will be considered and costed against other promotional activities.
The dynamic data on the site will be maintained by Crew using a standard database interface supplied by Hoop. Significant changes to the site will be made by HOOP when required and will be quoted for as separate jobs.
Crew will therefore have no ongoing maintenance charges payable to Hoop.
Task | Estimate (hours) |
Pre sales consultancy, preparation of proposal and agreement of costs. | 10 |
Graphic Design | 28 |
Menu | 3 |
The Collection | 24 |
Corporate Clothing | 10 |
Contact Crew | 8 |
Shopping Trolley | 15 |
Check Out | 10 |
Setup of Database | 8 |
Database Administration interface | 10 |
Review of Site and sign-off | 10 |
Total | 136 |
The figures are provisional, and are subject to change following the agreement of the proposal. HOOP charge £40 per hour for Web Site development, giving a total cost for building the site of £5,440.
At the meeting we briefly discussed an arrangement where Hoop would take a percentage of Gross Sales in exchange for work undertaken. It was felt that this would strengthen the partnership between Crew and Hoop and reduce the cost to Crew of developing / maintaining / promoting the site. Hoop are still very interested in such an arrangement, but obviously we need to discuss this further before any deal is agreed.
Hosting will cost a maximum of $900 per annum. HOOP will coordinate the process of purchasing web space, but fees will be payable by Crew directly to the ISP.
Initial Search Engine push - as described in section 4.3.2 - £1000.
HOOP are very keen to take on this project and are ready to start as soon as we are given the go-ahead. It is anticipated that the site can be built in 6 weeks from start to launch.
The project will be developed online, this gives Crew the ability to monitor progress on a day-to-day basis.
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Dated: Fri Mar 15 11:07:00 1999
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