Project Process and Services

Our sales process is helpful and informative. It typically looks more like a helpful consulting process than a sales call. We are ultimately selling our services and the reputation that comes along with our team. We always seek a long term partnership type relationship with our clients. It's in our best interest to only sell our services to businesses that we are upfront with and who affirm that we are the right eCommerce partner to move forward with.

Your business will never get a surprise proposal or contract with repeated phone calls to sign something. We take our time to make sure both our businesses are a good fit for each other. Over the years, we have seen many merchants sign quickly with other partners only to get burned and end up spending more time and more money than they ever expected to spend. Good partnerships that are responsible to each other is our ultimate goal.

Assuming it's a new project which includes everything being redesigned and rebuilt, you can expect the following process:

Project Kick-off Call

All decision makers, as well as the point person from your business, will interact with our core project team in order to review goals, expectations, processes and schedules as well as identify the forthcoming needs.

Discovery

This step may last from 1 to 6 weeks or more depending on the project size and requirements. This is a critical step to any new project. This phase uncovers the details of each requirement for the project to be designed and built.

UX Design (User Experience Design)

A UX design plan will accompany the Discovery phase. This allows merchants to see a graphical interpretation of what their frontend requirements will look like. A well thoughout UX plan is the phase that will most benefit your future store. Shoppers need to be aware of where they are in your store at all times, how to find what they want and checkout with ease.

Creative Design

A brand and design questionnaire will be issued and reviewed as a team to understand the new store needs and goals. The outcome of this document will drive the design intention and produce a branding and style guide for all design decisions going forward. This phase will produce a desktop version of all the primary pages as well as tablet and mobile versions of specific key pages.

Requirements Sign-off

Once the discovery, UX design and creative design are complete a final sign-off will take place with your business. This sign-off is an indication to your business and ours that you agree with the storefront and all the technical requirements that will ultimately be built into the new site. We don't like surprises at the end of a project nor does your business. This sign-off is an agreement of what to expect when the project goes live.

Building

During this phase a weekly status call will take place to give your business assurance that the project is on schedule and there are no blockers. Our team should have all the info needed in order to focus on the build of your new site. During this time there will be milestones that your business will be accountable to Rocket Web for in order to maintain the schedule. Some examples may be delivering a final product import file or providing all the content for certain pages before Rocket Web is complete. Near the 75% completion stage your business will get development server access to view the storefront and begin to get into the Magento admin to start becoming familiar with how the site will operate.

QA (Quality Assurance)

Once Rocket Web has completed the build on the development server, we will perform several weeks of QA. This is the process where we run manual and automated tests against the new build to reveal any backend and frontend bugs. We will begin to resolve these issues before we pass along the final site for your business to test.

UAT (User Acceptance Testing)

This phase allows your business to test the final build against the project sign-off requirements phase from earlier in the project. Any bugs or functional issues that are part of scope will be addressed and fixed.

Launch

There will be a code freeze for a certain number of days before Go Live where nothing is changed on the site. Rocket Web will follow our own internal launch process and confirm that your business is ready to go live. Our launch process typically takes place early AM, Monday - Wednesday. Upon launch, Rocket Web will run a suite of tests (smoke test) to insure the main functionality of the site works as we expect.

Follow-up and Warranty

A warranty period will be provided for your business to correct any new site issues discovered post-launch that were part of the original scope. Sometimes during the early phases of the project, new or modified scope arises. In order to keep on schedule, most of this scope is scheduled for implementation after the site launch. It's during this phase, after launch, that new or modified scope is started and deployed.

Managed Services

Rocket Web provides Managed Services for post-launch support and new site changes and improvements oafter the initial project is launched. Having a trusted development partner that knows your site inside and out is an important last step for any merchant to insure ongoing success.

Although we offer some flexibility in how this is approached, ultimately we are a professional services company. We expect to be compensated for the effort and time that goes into helping businesses plan and grow their eCommerce websites.

New Project

We have three ways to enter into new projects with our clients:

Fixed Bid - 1 Phase

This is the most popular and familiar approach to website development. This process includes gathering requirements at a medium level and then submitting a proposal defining the scope, expectations, schedule and cost of the project. The cost is broken into line items with a blended, fixed, hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours expected for each line item of services and products. The common downside to this approach is that new requirements or additional details to requirements may be discovered during the project because not enough time was spent up front to fully flesh out all details for the project. This requires either a change request and delay in schedule or an agreement that it will be postponed until after launch. Rocket Web prefers not to issue change requests and delay schedules unless it's necessary to the business. This method tends to carry extra risks for both parties and can only be managed if clear requirements and expectations are communicated by the merchant up front. In our experience, this is very difficult for a merchant to do even with prior, in depth knowledge of Magento.

Fixed Bid - 2 Phase

This is the preferred approach by many merchants because there is clarity on both sides from the beginning. This process includes splitting the normal Fixed Bid 1 Phase project into two phases and two separate contracts. Phase 1/Contract 1 only includes Discovery and UX design. A deep discovery process takes place with a follow up UX design that visually reflects the requirements discovered and clarified. Once this phase is complete, Rocket Web can provide a Phase 2 contract with the effort and time to design, build, test and launch the project. This ultimately allows the merchant freedom to go as far as they want to with their time and money but also allows Rocket Web to be more efficient with time and resources when planning Phase 2. This approach reduces risk and results in a lower overall schedule and cost to a merchant than a single phase fixed bid project.

Time & Material / Agile

Many merchants that have built sites before know how painful it can be to figure out every detail for a project before development begins. Upfront discovery for merchants not familiar with how Magento works by default is difficult. When the Agile methodology is applied to building a new Magento site, we look first at the bare minimum requirements to get a project built. Within about 2 weeks, we could build a default website, add a logo, load in a ready to go product catalog, set shipping rates and payment methods. Now we have a fully functional yet perhaps boring website. At this point we can work together to plan changes to the site in 2 week increments. After each 2 week block we can review together how the site looks and works and go live when we're happy we have a site that will sell. At any point after the first 2 weeks, the site could technically go live and start selling. With this approach, discovery happens at the same time as development with changes in direction encouraged as we see how Magento defaults work along side merchant desires. This is an iterative approach where a merchant gets to learn how Magento works by default and we are less likely to develop website features that don't result in more sales or increased efficiency. This process can seem scary since there isn't a fixed budget or launch date but when this methodology is embraced, it is proven to have the best ROI.

Managed Services

We offer more details about our Managed Services here: https://rocketweb.com/faq/services/managed-services#what-is-rocket-webs-approach-to-managed-services