Ecommerce: Creating Business Opportunities by Mere Chance

Every year, more companies launch their own version of a solution already offered by dozens of others. This constant wave of new software usually comes from the same source: someone spotted an outdated piece of their own workflow and built something to fix it. Most of these tools only scale within the narrow area that sparked the idea, so businesses end up stacking a second application to cover what the first never handled well. It snowballs from there.

Strip down an online retail business and it looks like unlocking the phone of someone who downloaded every app imaginable: dozens of solutions bolted onto one operation. Some are excellent. Some are solid. Some are just okay. Some will not survive first contact with a real business.

The excellent ones give you a real-time view of your operation that would otherwise take too long to assemble. But success makes them ambitious, and they bolt on features outside their core expertise. You are already paying hundreds or thousands a month, so you subsidize those side ventures anyway.

The solid ones are reliable for exactly what you hired them to do. The first two or three years go well, then a buyer acquires the company and it starts belonging to someone who never understood the original problem it solved. Eventually it graduates into the excellent category, and the ambition creeps in right behind it.

The just-okay ones often had a genuinely good idea but stumbled on execution. Most get acquired by someone with the scale to actually compete.

Know Your Business Before Anyone Else Tries To

Ecommerce companies are genuinely good at understanding their own product. What they are far less equipped to evaluate is everything required to run a bulletproof operation behind it. That gap is exactly where vendors compete to make the best pitch. Sales teams can oversell aggressively: your business needs “20,” they promise “50.” What follows is a wasteful back-and-forth, or a signed contract that hits a wall two months later when the vendor admits they can deliver “15” and getting to “20” will need more time, more development, or something close to a miracle.

The lesson: know your business well enough to ask the right questions, so you guide the sales conversation instead of being guided by it. Be transparent, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Chances are you know someone who has already been through exactly what you’re about to face.

To the solution builders: every business is different, and cookie-cutter solutions do not hold up. Any real problem has more than one way to be solved, so go find five or ten ways to solve the same issue instead of one. You’ll make a lot of companies genuinely happy.

And if you run an Indian restaurant, don’t start selling pizza. It won’t bring you more business.