Purpose: To give Turing students and introduction to basic ecommerce principles so that they can develop back end systems that provide more business value.
Each number below represents a slide. The contents of the slide would be the topic and any necessary definitions. I would primarily use discussion to explain the concepts in detail.
Outline:
1) My background: started ecommerce company in 2012 and have learned from mistakes in all these areas
2) Basic rule of ecommerce: value of a customer to the business > cost of acquiring that customer
3) What is the value of a customer to the business? Total Lifetime Value
4) What is the cost of acquiring that customer? Cost of ads or other marketing
5) Most common acquisition flow: referral to website --> email opt in --> email click --> purchase
6) Important marketing metrics in this flow:
- open rate
- click through rate
- page conversion rate
7) Important customer data to capture:
- date and source of initial contact
- date and source of impetus to purchase
8) tying it all together - the backend needs to be flexible and able to capture the data on inbound traffic and customer behavior in a way that makes it easy to do the following:
- change the layout and behavior of pages to change conversion rates
- be modular so that many versions of pages can be created for different audiences without much difficulty
- capture and make it easy to access data to calculate LTV and cost per acquisition