Playbooks Build vs Buy: E-commerce Platform - Cons Playbook Custom (Build) - Cons * Higher upfront cost and time‑to‑market; significant opportunity cost. * Ongoing maintenance burden: on‑call, upgrades, security patching, observability. * Must keep pace with industry best practices (tax, fraud, SEO, accessibility). * Compliance is on you (privacy, accessibility, security testing). * Experimentation velocity depends on your internal tooling and process.
Playbooks Vendor Management Playbook Purpose * Manage key vendors across the commerce stack to protect revenue, margins, and customer experience * Ensure vendor decisions are measurable, reversible, and aligned with security and privacy Vendor categories Payments * Processors * Fraud tools Tax * Calculation * Exemption * Filing ERP and WMS * Catalog * Inventory * Orders * Accounting CDN and media * DAM * Image and
Playbooks E-commerce Team Structure Playbook Team Structure Playbook Purpose Define clear ownership across e-commerce growth, platform, operations, marketplaces, and risk - and make hiring and onboarding repeatable. Roles E-commerce Manager * Own the e-commerce platform - architecture and delivery * Own the roadmap * Run the weekly business review * Own P&L accountability * Drive profit through
Articles What Is the Best E-Commerce Website on the Planet? The best one is the one that doesn't exist. Not because websites are useless, and not because you should rebuild from scratch. Because every interface is a barrier unless it helps the product decision. Usability is how you make that barrier as thin as possible. As an e-
Articles E-Commerce Checkout as an Input Quality System Many e-commerce checkouts rely on freeform entry and deal with data quality later. That approach increases friction and produces inconsistent input (typos, autofill artifacts, and formatting drift) that turns into downstream cost: shipping exceptions, re-ships, returns, support tickets, manual review queues, and payment exceptions. I designed and own
Articles Risk and Trust in E-commerce: The Two-Way Road E-commerce is a business built on exchange under uncertainty. A buyer wants a product. A seller wants money. That deal sounds simple until you remember what online changes. The two sides do not see each other. The product cannot be touched. Money and goods move on different timelines. Delivery
Articles Niche E-commerce: The Line of Death and the AI Illusion This article is about a specific band of businesses. It is about established niche commerce brands that are real operators but not giants. Typical signs: A catalog measured in thousands of parent products (not hundreds, not millions). Variants may multiply that into several times more SKUs. A stable assortment where
Articles Why Most AI Automation Dies in Production Read this to challenge the comfortable illusions around “AI automation.” Demos are not reality. Production is a long tail of exceptions, approvals, evidence, and cross-tool execution. Without a Role-First Operating Layer, AI does not replace people - it becomes an assistant, and humans stay the glue forever. The Missing
Articles Ecommerce Catalog Search in the Age of Artificial Intelligence AI-powered search sounds like the future of ecommerce. In reality, profitable catalog search still runs on boring engineering: a strong dictionary and thesaurus, clean inputs, explicit intent routing, and fast retrieval. Over time I refined a simple 5-layer architecture that turns catalog intent into orders: Language layer ->
Articles Maximize Profit - Long-Tail Merchandising That Works The e-commerce merchandising problem In every online store, the core merchandising challenge is deciding what to show above the fold and how to order products so that we: * maximize sales now (exploitation) * do not kill future sales by never giving new or low-volume products a chance (exploration) * avoid
Checkout & Order Automated Order Processing Module Automate end-to-end order processing by connecting the ERP system to the e-commerce platform, ensuring accurate data, fraud prevention, and seamless order creation. Functions * Initiate batch order processing from ERP to e-commerce platform * Correct and verify billing and shipping addresses * Correct and validate customer email addresses * Perform
Checkout & Order One-Page Fast Checkout Module Streamline the checkout process into a single, optimized page to increase conversion rates and reduce cart abandonment. Functions * Suggest first name and last name in real time as the customer types * Suggest email address based on detected patterns and common domains * Suggest city and state automatically from ZIP code using
