ECOMMERCE WEBSITE BRIEF — NIALL ARNFIELD
Reusable blank brief. Replace bracketed fields with your own requirements.
Source: https://niallarnfield.com/ecommerce-website-brief/

1. BUSINESS OUTCOME
Business / contact / decision owner: [ ]
Current website and platform: [ ]
Main commercial problem, with evidence and date: [ ]
Primary accepted conversion and spam/test exclusions: [ ]
Baseline and measurement owner: [ ]

2. CUSTOMERS AND JOURNEYS
Priority audiences / markets / languages / currencies: [ ]
Three journeys that must work at launch: [ ]
Trade accounts, customer roles or approval needs: [ ]

3. CATALOGUE AND CONTENT
Approximate products / variants / categories: [ ]
Source of truth for IDs, pricing, stock and descriptions: [ ]
Representative simple product, complex product and discontinued product: [ ]
Bundles, compatibility, personalisation or made-to-order rules: [ ]
Product-data owner and validation method: [ ]
Images, rights, source models and missing assets: [ ]
Content approval owner and deadline: [ ]

4. TRANSACTIONS AND OPERATIONS
Payment methods / delivery regions / returns rules: [ ]
Tax and legal policy owner (business approval required): [ ]
Stock source / reservation timing / oversell policy: [ ]
Fulfilment, ERP, PIM, CRM and email systems: [ ]
For each integration: owner, direction, trigger, fields, failure handling: [ ]
Manual fallback during an outage: [ ]

5. SEARCH AND MIGRATION
Existing organic landing pages and evidence window: [ ]
URLs to retain / map / intentionally remove, with reasons: [ ]
Product, account, order and content migration scope: [ ]
Redirect map reviewer / reconciliation checks / rollback owner: [ ]

6. DESIGN, ACCESSIBILITY AND PERFORMANCE
Brand assets and references (what specifically works about each): [ ]
Required devices and browsers: [ ]
Keyboard, zoom, forms and error-recovery acceptance tasks: [ ]
Lab test conditions / field-data source / performance budget: [ ]
Third-party scripts and their business owners: [ ]

7. DELIVERY AND COMMERCIAL SCOPE
Budget range and what it includes: [ ]
Target date / reason / dependencies: [ ]
Must have at launch: [ ]
Price separately: [ ]
Out of scope: [ ]
Assumptions needing discovery: [ ]
Who approves scope changes: [ ]

8. ACCEPTANCE, RELEASE AND HANDOVER
Task | expected result | evidence | owner | pass/fail: [ ]
Examples: unavailable variant; interrupted payment; integration outage;
keyboard checkout; redirect mapping; accurate analytics consent behaviour.
Staging approval / production approval / recovery decision owner: [ ]
Who owns hosting, domain, accounts, content and recurring costs: [ ]
Editor training / documentation / source handover / support term: [ ]
Review date after launch: [ ]

Do not include passwords, API keys, payment-card details or customer exports.
Agree a separate secure transfer route if implementation later requires access.