E-commerce PRD template

Overview

E-commerce products fail at the spec stage, not the build stage. By the time you hit checkout logic, you've already discovered that nobody decided whether guests can buy without an account, which payment gateway handles refunds, or how inventory updates when an order is cancelled. An e-commerce PRD template forces those decisions before a single line of code is written.

Draftlytic takes your one-line store idea and generates an editable, structured spec built around the decisions that actually matter for e-commerce: product catalogues and variants, cart and checkout flow, payment and fulfilment providers, order lifecycle states, and the trust signals that convert browsers into buyers. Everything lands in a prioritised feature list you can drag-reorder and push straight to your AI coding tool.

What an e-commerce spec actually needs to cover

Generic PRD templates skip the hard bits. A good e-commerce spec nails down the full order lifecycle — cart → checkout → payment → fulfilment → return — before you build any of it. Draftlytic generates a typed data model covering your core entities: Product, Variant, Cart, Order, Customer, and the relationships between them. It maps out the screens and the API endpoints behind each one, so your AI coding tool knows exactly what routes to scaffold.

On the business side, the spec captures your monetisation model (direct sales, marketplace commission, subscriptions, or a mix), your pricing tiers if you have them with per-feature tier assignment, and a NON-GOALS list that tells the AI what NOT to build — critical when every coding tool wants to add features. It also records external services: which payment gateway, which shipping provider, which email/transactional service, so the AI isn't guessing at integration points.

E-commerce-specific decisions Draftlytic captures

The questions that matter for an e-commerce build are different from a SaaS tool. Draftlytic's spec generation probes the decisions that derail e-commerce projects mid-build:

**Catalogue structure** — flat product list or categories/collections? Simple products or variants (size, colour, SKU-level inventory)? Digital downloads or physical goods requiring shipping?

**Checkout and guest access** — does the buyer need an account? What fields are required at checkout? Is there a one-page or multi-step flow?

**Payments and refunds** — which gateway(s), whether to support saved cards, how refunds and partial refunds flow back through the order state machine.

**Inventory and fulfilment** — does stock decrement at add-to-cart or at payment confirmation? Are there multiple warehouses or fulfilment providers?

**Trust and conversion** — review/ratings system, return policy visibility, trust badges — all captured as explicit features with priority labels so you know what ships in v1.

At Detailed depth, each of these features gets up to four short, testable acceptance criteria so your AI coding tool can verify its own output.

From spec to shipped: exporting your e-commerce brief

Once your e-commerce spec is generated, every section is editable in chat. Ask the AI to add a wishlist feature, swap the payment provider, or tighten the return flow — changes are reflected across the whole spec, not just in one section.

When you're ready to build, export options include PRD as Markdown, PDF, or ZIP, a separate sequenced implementation plan that tells your AI coding tool which parts to build first, or a direct push to a connected GitHub repo. The implementation plan is aware of your priority labels — must-haves ship before nice-to-haves, and future items are explicitly deferred so the AI doesn't sneak them in.

Draftlytic is free to start. Paid tiers unlock deeper specs, AI Scan (which flags gaps and inconsistencies like missing order-state transitions or unassigned checkout features), and higher export limits.

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