Ecommerce Website Requirements Document: A Complete Template for WooCommerce, Shopify and Webflow Projects

An ecommerce website requirements document describes what your online store must do, who it serves, which constraints it must respect and how it will be signed off. A useful one covers 12 areas: goals, audiences, catalog, buying journey, payments, shipping, admin, integrations, SEO, performance, accessibility and acceptance testing.

Skip it, and every agency quotes a different project. You end up with three proposals you cannot compare, one at a fraction of the price of another, and no way of knowing which is realistic. Worse, the gaps surface mid-project as change requests.

This guide walks through the structure we use with clients in Europe and North Africa, with a practical example for each section and the questions you need to answer before choosing between WooCommerce, Shopify and Webflow.

Why your ecommerce project needs a requirements document

An online store is a system, not a brochure. The catalog feeds product pages, which feed the cart, which triggers payment, order emails, fulfilment and delivery. One vague decision at any step slows down everything after it.

A solid requirements document does three jobs:

• Makes quotes comparable: every agency prices the same scope.
• Narrows the platform choice: your constraints (payments, languages, catalog size) rule some options out immediately.
• Defines "done": acceptance is based on written criteria, not opinions.

You do not need a 60-page specification. Eight to fifteen precise pages beat a generic template copied from the internet.

The 12 sections of an ecommerce website requirements document

1. Business context, goals and KPIs

Introduce the company, the offer and the reason for the project: a new store, a redesign or a replatforming. Then set measurable targets such as monthly orders, average order value and online share of revenue after 12 months.

Example: "Reach 400 orders per month by Q4 2027 with an average order value of €65 and a conversion rate of 2% on mobile."

2. Audiences and markets

Who buys, from which countries, on which devices, in which languages and currencies? A store selling in euros to France and Germany needs a very different setup from one selling in a single market and language.

3. Product catalog

This is the most underestimated section. Document:

• the number of products at launch and in two years;
• variants (size, colour, capacity) and their average count per product;
• attributes needed for filtering (brand, material, compatibility);
• where product data comes from: spreadsheet, ERP, supplier feed or manual entry;
• the state of existing content: photos, descriptions, spec sheets.

This directly affects budget and platform choice. Webflow, for instance, counts every variant toward its plan's item limit, as explained in our Webflow Ecommerce guide.

4. Buying journey and storefront features

Describe the ideal path from homepage to order confirmation: site search, filters, product page, cart, guest or account checkout, discount codes, wishlist, reviews.

Tag every feature as must-have, should-have or later. This MoSCoW-style prioritisation is the easiest way to keep version one on budget.

5. Payments

List the payment methods you need and the legal entity that collects the money. Cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Klarna-style instalments and bank transfer all have different implications per platform and per country. If you sell into North Africa, our guide to online payment in Tunisia covers the local options.

6. Shipping and fulfilment

Delivery zones, carriers, shipping rules (flat rate, weight-based, free above a threshold), click and collect, tracking and returns. Also state who picks and packs orders, and how order data reaches the warehouse or 3PL.

7. Admin and team workflows

Who does what every day? Number of admin users, roles (catalog, orders, customer service), invoices, accounting exports and notifications. An admin built around your team's routine saves hours every week.

8. Integrations

ERP, POS, CRM, email marketing, accounting, carriers, marketplaces, Google Merchant Center and Meta catalogs. For each one, specify the direction of data (import, export, two-way sync) and how often it runs.

9. SEO and existing traffic

Your requirements should include verifiable SEO foundations: clean URLs, editable title tags and meta descriptions, Product structured data, an XML sitemap and controlled handling of filters and pagination. Google lists these points in its ecommerce best practices for Search.

For a redesign, add a complete 301 redirect plan. It is the single most important safeguard for your rankings: see our ecommerce migration SEO checklist.

10. Performance and hosting

Replace "the site must be fast" with numbers. Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds are a sensible baseline: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1, measured on mobile.

11. Accessibility, security and privacy

Ask for WCAG 2.2 level AA. If you sell to consumers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025; our EAA compliance guide explains what that means for online stores. Add security requirements (HTTPS, backups, update policy) and GDPR obligations for customer data.

12. Acceptance testing, training, maintenance and ownership

List mandatory test scenarios: an order with each payment method, cancellation, refund, transactional emails and mobile rendering. Plan team training and a maintenance agreement. Above all, make sure the domain, hosting, code, payment accounts and customer data are registered to your company.

How your requirements point to WooCommerce, Shopify or Webflow

A well-written document often makes the platform decision for you. These are the requirements that matter most:

For a deeper comparison, read Shopify vs WooCommerce in 2026.

Example: a homeware brand selling across the EU

Consider a small homeware brand based in Lyon. Its first brief was one sentence: "a modern store with online payment". Once structured, the requirements read:

• 180 products, most with 2 to 4 colour variants, about 600 SKUs;
• sales in France, Belgium and Germany, in French and German, priced in euros;
• cards, PayPal and buy-now-pay-later at checkout;
• a nightly stock sync with the warehouse's system;
• WCAG 2.2 AA, as the brand sells to EU consumers.

With these facts on paper, Webflow drops out (localized products, catalog size) and the decision comes down to Shopify for low maintenance or WooCommerce for custom logic. The quotes the brand received finally covered the same scope, and the price gap between them narrowed sharply.

Common mistakes to avoid

1. Prescribing solutions instead of needs: write "customers can filter by size and price", not "install plugin X".
2. Forgetting content: who writes product descriptions, who supplies photos, and by when?
3. Ignoring life after launch: maintenance, updates, SEO and paid acquisition are recurring costs.
4. Underestimating checkout: the Baymard Institute puts average cart abandonment at around 70%. Our WooCommerce checkout optimization guide covers the fixes.
5. Hiding the budget: a range lets agencies propose the best solution within your envelope.

What budget should you plan?

Cost follows scope. Once your requirements are clear, you can benchmark them against our published ranges in ecommerce website cost in Tunisia, which is also useful if you are considering nearshore development to reduce build costs without lowering quality.

Conclusion: short, specific and decision-ready

A good ecommerce website requirements document is not paperwork. It saves time, protects your budget and settles the WooCommerce, Shopify or Webflow question before a single line of code is written. Focus on goals, catalog, payments, shipping and acceptance criteria, and the rest follows.

Short on time? Our team runs a scoping workshop, turns it into a requirements document you own, then designs and builds your store. Explore our ecommerce website development and WooCommerce development services.

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