The conversation starts at the wrong end
Almost every D2C conversation in this sector opens the same way. Shopify or Magento or Adobe. Build it ourselves or buy it in. Headless or not. The platform.
I have been having versions of this conversation for twenty-five years (long enough to have opened a few of them at the wrong end myself), and I think the platform is now the last problem to solve, not the first. The choice is wide, sound and tried and tested. Good ecommerce platforms are ten a penny. Whatever you pick, it will almost certainly work, and if it does not, you can change it.
The launches that fail do not fail at the platform. They fail at the boring end. The operational end. And the operational end has to be sorted first, for a reason that has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with money.
The cost asymmetry
Get the technology wrong and the bill for putting it right is relatively small. For a large manufacturer, it is annoying. It is one difficult meeting. A year later nobody remembers it.
Get fulfilment wrong and you are into millions. Stock you cannot ship. Orders refunded at scale. A returns process invented live, in public, by people who have never run one. A brand that spent decades earning trust on the shelf finding out what one-star delivery reviews do to it. Week three of a launch where the warehouse cannot cope is a complete car crash, losing trust from your staff as well as your loyal customers.
The two mistakes are not in the same league. Which makes the standard sequence genuinely odd. Organisations lead with the cheap, reversible decision and leave the expensive, hard-to-reverse one until last.
That sequencing, I would argue, is exactly what kills launches in the first ninety days. The fatal decisions were made months earlier, at the wrong end of the problem, while everyone was comparing platforms.
Start at the purchase and walk backwards
When I am asked to look at a launch plan (or, increasingly, a launch that has already gone wrong), I do not start at the top of the marketing funnel. I start from a single moment: someone has just made a purchase. Then I walk backwards through the business and look for where it is likely to break.
It nearly always breaks somewhere, because almost every function in an established manufacturer or FMCG business was built for the old model and assumes it. The systems assume pallets. The service team assume dealers. Finance assumes thirty-day terms and a few hundred trade accounts, not thirty thousand consumers who each spent £40 once. Nobody decided any of this. It is what the business was shaped to do, very well, for decades.
Two functions break more often than any other.
Customer service: built for the wrong question
The existing customer service team are usually very good at their job. The trouble is that their job was fielding a modest number of niche, technical product questions from people who already know the product well.
A consumer channel sends them something completely different: a high volume of people asking the same single question. ‘Where is my order.’ Day after day, in numbers nobody on the team has ever seen, from customers who have no relationship with the business beyond one parcel they are waiting for.
The instinct is to staff up. I think that instinct may be wrong, because it scales the team without asking whether the team is the right shape. You end up paying more people to answer a question the operation should barely be generating, while the queries that genuinely need an expert sit in the same queue getting answered slower.
The question at the planning stage is not ‘how many more people do we need?’. It is whether a function built for one kind of conversation can carry a completely different one.
Most launch plans do not have anyone that is paid to worry about that.
The warehouse: pallets, not parcels
The second break point is the one I would put money on. A manufacturer’s warehouse has spent its entire life worrying about pallets. Full loads, trade orders, known hauliers, a forklift and a schedule. It is very good at that, because that is and always has been their business.
A consumer order asks that same warehouse to find one item, pick it, wrap it, label it, hand it to one of several couriers who all turn up at different times, and do all of that profitably, at unpredictable volume, with a returns flow running in the other direction. The gap between those two operations is enormous, and closing it is one of the most expensive pieces of work in the whole programme.
Most launch plans treat that gap as a line item. The platform gets a six-month workstream and a steering committee. Fulfilment gets a row in a spreadsheet. I am deliberately not getting into how the gap should be closed here, because that is a subject in its own right and not one to settle in the final month before launch. The point of this piece is narrower: the gap exists, it is the expensive one, and it should be the first conversation, not the last.
What the numbers will not tell you until it is too late
There is a failure that only shows up after launch, and it is worth flagging because almost nobody plans for it.
A manufacturer’s existing website is usually a very good information site. Years of content. Manuals, spec sheets, dealer locators, often top-ranked for the category. It pulls serious traffic, and very little of that traffic is there to buy anything.
McKinsey’s research on appliance manufacturers puts a number on the gap. 32% of customers visit a manufacturer’s website during their purchase journey. Only 1.6% buy anything there.
When the site becomes transactional, two things change at once. The site itself narrows and gets more product-heavy. And the traffic changes with it. The profile of who arrives, what they came for and what counts as success all shift underneath the redesign. Teams plan meticulously for the new design. In my experience almost nobody plans for the audience changing.
Then the first reports land. Traffic looks healthy, because the old informational audience is still arriving. Conversion looks woeful, because most of that audience has never bought from the website and still isn’t. And the launch review ends up arguing about whether the channel is failing, when the honest answer is that the numbers are measuring two different audiences as if they were one. The dashboard will not volunteer that distinction. Somebody has to know to ask.
Why this keeps happening
Part of it is reflex. Most established manufacturers and FMCG businesses have run every operational function in-house for decades and have little experience of any other arrangement. ‘In-house is best’ is close to a DNA-level belief in the sector. So when the warehouse gap and the service gap finally surface, the default answer is ‘we will handle it ourselves’, which converts the most expensive problem on the project into an internal build, from a standing start, on a launch deadline. I am not going to argue the alternative here. The point for now is that the reflex to build in-house may not be the right answer for early days of your D2C channel.
Part of it is politics. In large, old organisations the exciting first D2C conversation tends to happen with the part of the business that does not own the commercial strategy. An innovation team, a digital team, sometimes one determined enthusiast. They know the channel matters and they are usually right about the problem. They may also be nowhere near the budget. Early enthusiasm dies somewhere in the corridor between that team and whoever owns the P&L, and the project drifts back to the comfortable conversation: the platform.
The diagnostic to run before sign-off
There is a check any sponsor can run before the launch plan is signed off, and it does not need a consultant, which I say through slightly gritted teeth.
Walk the warehouse. Find the person who will pick the first hundred consumer orders and ask them to describe their day. Then put their answer next to the launch plan.
The gap between the two is the risk. Not the platform shortlist, not the design concepts, not the beautifully formatted launch deck. If the warehouse floor and the boardroom are describing two different processes, the launch is already in trouble.
The short version
If this piece changes one thing about your launch plan, make it the order of the conversation.
- The platform is the cheap, reversible decision. In my experience a relatively low bill of works puts a wrong choice right. Fulfilment is the expensive, hard-to-reverse one, and it can run to millions. Sort the expensive end first.
- Work backwards from the moment of purchase, not forwards from the marketing funnel. Almost every function in an established business was built for the old model and assumes it.
- Expect customer service and the warehouse to break first. One was built for niche product questions, the other for pallets.
- Plan for the traffic profile to change when the site turns transactional. Healthy traffic and woeful conversion usually means two audiences being measured as one.
- Before sign-off, walk the warehouse and ask the person who will pick the first hundred orders to describe their day. The gap between their answer and the plan is the risk.
The platform conversation can wait. It is the one part of the project that will still be easy to fix later.
