Lesson 1: The Essentials of eCommerce

The future of eCommerce is ever-changing, yet exceptionally promising – especially for aspiring entrepreneurs and individuals aiming to follow a career in eCommerce. This goliath industry is continuously shaped and reshaped by various micro, meso, and macro trends – predominantly fuelled by the introduction of innovative technologies and changes in consumer shopping-related behaviour around the globe. Given the powerful digital shift every sector is currently experiencing and the transformation from brick-to-click business-related engagements, there’s no better time than now to join the eCommerce community. Within this lesson, we’ll primarily discuss the essentials of eCommerce – some of the most crucial knowledge you need to garner to kick-start your eCommerce journey.

Lesson 2: The Power of Visioning

As an aspiring eCommerce entrepreneur or an individual aiming to follow a career in eCommerce, it’s crucial that you understand the power of visioning and research. These practical concepts serve as vital 1st steps when starting an online business. It plays an important role in both establishing and maintaining a strong foundation for your online business – not only for the launch thereof but its growth trajectory into the future. Apart from creating a solid foundation for your business, it also serves as the roadmap to business success and creates a sense of direction around which all strategies and subsequent decisions and actions are shaped. Within this lesson, we’ll primarily focus on creating a strong foundation and direction for your business, by focusing on two fundamental concepts – visioning and research. Throughout, we’ll cover some of the most crucial theories and exercises to assist you with defining, designing, and ensuring the desired future state of your business. 

Lesson 3: Offering Design Thinking

If you’re an entrepreneur starting a small business, you’ll most likely need a supply chain to bring your offering from concept to consumer. If you’re an entrepreneur striving toward a competitive advantage, chances are you’ll need a sound value chain to enable the realisation and delivery of optimal value for both your customers and business. Designing and activating the optimal supply chain and value chain for your small business depends on the nature of both your business and offering. The key areas of differentiation will depend on whether you provide a physical or digital product or service. In this lesson, we’ll focus on applying design-thinking to your product/service and creating a supply chain, as well as a value chain that supports this design thinking process. 

Lesson 4: Revenue & Business Models

Throughout the years, revenue models and business models have changed, due to various internal and external pressures experienced. Some businesses and industries, however, have remained stagnant, maintaining comfort in their traditional methods of strategic endeavours. Although various large-scale companies’ secret sauce lies within their original business models, they use hybrid approaches to maintain their competitive edge. In this lesson, we’ll focus on examples of revenue and business models available for start-up business entrepreneurs or eCommerce professionals to select from, as well as explore the basic components of each to assist you with selecting the best models suited to your business and product/service vision, goals, and objectives. 

Lesson 5: The Master Manuscript

Irrespective of the type of business you’re aiming to launch, whether traditional or digital, your business plan will be your best asset – especially during the seed and start-up stages of your business. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you don’t need a business plan. If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. Yes, crafting the optimal business plan that provides a strong roadmap to success for your business takes time – but, patience is key. In this lesson, we’ll focus on creating the master manuscript for your business – your business plan. Probably the most important document you’ll have by your side when starting, launching, growing and scaling your business. 

Lesson 6: Ultimate Branding Guide

In today’s hypercompetitive world, businesses have entered a battleground for both the continuous attention, trust and buying power of customers – the focus has thus shifted primarily to relationship-building. Customers are overloaded with competitive marketing-related content and products/services that could potentially serve their needs. With this rapid increase in rivalry across industries, businesses have to continuously optimise their overall business, offerings and marketing efforts to stand out from the crowd. With this, businesses have had to optimise their brand strategies – the primary element distributed throughout the business lifecycle that ties everything together. In this lesson, we’ll comprehensively explore the concept of branding, and how your brand could serve as the master key to unlocking the continuous support of both prospective and current customers. 

Lesson 7: The Little Black eBook

There’s no denying that the entire experience of planning, launching, growing and scaling a business, whether traditional or digital, is filled with many challenges. The journey of creating a business is severely nerve-racking, filled with risks and could often become a lonely path. However, through well-executed professional networking, the journey of starting a business can become thrilling, filled with invaluable opportunities and supportive, as well as like-minded partners. The primary goal of this lesson is to provide you with an introduction to professional networking, as well as the key consideration areas for individuals aiming to start a business – whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a future influencer or simply a professional embarking on a career within the digital arena. 

Lesson 8: The Power of Partnerships

The principle of partnerships has been around since the dawn of the business arena. Since then, the famous saying “two heads are better than one” has become the best approach to solving complex problems. Whether creating internal partnerships between departments and employees or establishing external partnerships with businesses within your professional network, they’ve become an integral part of the growth and scaling prospects of any business. In today’s fast-paced business landscape, the independent and closed-off approach has been deemed inadequate to successfully build, grow and scale a business. Businesses who grow independently and organically at first, have to seek new ways to drive collaborative efforts that deliver on what their customers need now and into the future. Throughout this lesson, we’ll focus on the value of establishing and nurturing powerful partnerships that will support the growth of your future online business.