Somewhere in your building, a decision has been made. The board has approved a direct-to-consumer channel. The MD is excited about it. The Commercial Director wants progress in the next board report. A consultancy may have been through. A strategy deck almost certainly exists. And now the project has landed on someone’s desk.
Very often, that someone is you.
You might have the words ‘ecommerce’ or ‘digital’ or ‘D2C’ in your job title. You might have had it quietly added to your existing responsibilities without anyone adjusting the rest of your workload. You might come from sales, operations, marketing, or somewhere adjacent. What you probably do not have, if you are honest with yourself, is a clear playbook for what comes next.
I spend a lot of time with people in exactly your position. What follows is roughly what I would say to you across a kitchen table if you called me after week one.
The gap is bigger than it looks from the boardroom
The distance between a D2C strategy and a working D2C operation is much wider than the deck suggests. ‘Launch a direct channel’ sounds like a project. In practice it is an operational transformation that touches almost every function in the business.
You will need to choose a platform, integrate it with the ERP, set up payment gateways that can handle consumer card transactions at scale, redesign the fulfillment workflow for single-unit consumer orders, build a consumer returns process, configure finance for consumer revenue recognition and refund handling, set up customer service for a different type of enquiry, clean up the product data, create consumer-facing content, and coordinate all of this across departments that have never had to work together like this before.
If you have D2C experience from a previous role, none of this will surprise you. If you do not (and many people handed D2C briefs in manufacturing and FMCG businesses genuinely do not), the scale can be disorienting at first. That disorientation is legitimate. It is not a sign that you are the wrong person for the job. It is a sign that the job is bigger than the brief.
Where to honestly start
The instinct, on week one, is to produce a plan. Resist it briefly. Before you can plan, you need to understand what you are actually working with, and that starts with an honest audit of the operational reality underneath the strategy.
Start with the systems. What ERP does the business run, and can it process individual consumer orders? If it was built for trade (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, or something bespoke), the answer is likely ‘not without work.’ The integration between ecommerce and ERP is the single most important technical decision in the project.
Look at the warehouse. How are orders currently picked and packed? Is the operation set up for pallets and cases, or can it handle single units? Where would consumer returns physically go, and who would process them? If the answer is a shrug, the fulfillment workflow needs designing before the site goes live. Not after.
Look at the product data. Pull up what actually exists in the ERP or PIM and assess it honestly. Are there consumer-facing descriptions, or just trade catalogue entries? Are the images usable online? Are weights and dimensions recorded at individual unit level? If the data is thin (and it almost always is), factor in the time to fix it. This is one of those workstreams that blocks everything else once you realise.
Look at payments and finance. Consumer card payments work differently from trade invoicing. Refunds, chargebacks, fraud prevention, and consumer revenue recognition are new muscles that most B2B finance teams have not had to develop. The systems and the processes both need attention, and this is where late discoveries tend to hurt the most.
And look at customer service. Who currently handles inbound queries, and what are they used to dealing with? Trade account management and consumer customer service are different disciplines. A consumer who wants to know where their parcel is needs a different response, in a different tone, at a different speed, than a dealer querying an invoice.
That audit is not glamorous. It will not produce a plan the board can get excited about. It will produce the one thing you need before you can commit to a timeline or a launch date: an accurate view of what the project actually involves, and an honest inventory of the gaps that have to be closed before a consumer can place an order.
The politics
The operational questions are hard enough. The political ones can be harder.
You are sitting between a sponsor who wants progress and a set of departments who did not ask for this project. The sales team may see D2C as a threat to their dealer relationships and their commissions. IT will have concerns about integration timelines and stability. The warehouse team will have views on what is realistic. Finance will want a business case that stacks up at unit level, not just at the strategic level that got the board to say yes.
None of these people are wrong. Their concerns are legitimate and usually based on a more detailed understanding of their function than the strategy deck accounted for. Your job is not to override them. It is to navigate them, to understand what each function needs to make D2C work within their world, and to feed that reality back into the project plan.
This is where external support can make a genuine difference. Not because you cannot do it, but because an experienced outside perspective can see across the departments in a way that is difficult when you are inside the organisation. They can ask the blunt questions that are politically awkward for you to ask. They can flag the operational gaps the strategy missed. They can suggest a pilot, a test and learn to make it manageable.
They can bring the experience of having done it before, which, when you are doing it for the first time, is worth more than any deck.
The hard part is after launch
The thing that catches most people off guard is that D2C does not end at launch. Launch is the point where everything you have built gets tested under real conditions, and roughly half of it will need adjusting.
Stock syncs that looked fine in testing behave differently under real order volumes. Customer service scripts that seem comprehensive do not cover the query 40% of consumers actually ask. The pick and pack process that worked for twenty test orders does not scale to two hundred.
The first 90 days after go-live are the hardest part of the entire project, and they are the part that strategy decks routinely underestimate. Having someone in the room during that window who worries about the details (the stock levels, the error logs, the customer complaints, the warehouse team’s workarounds) is the difference between a D2C channel that beds in and one that becomes an expensive source of operational frustration.
This is also where it becomes obvious, if it was not already, that D2C is not a project with an end date. It is a channel that needs running. The question is not whether it launches. The question is whether it keeps working once the launch noise has died down.
A last thought
You have been handed something difficult. That is worth acknowledging honestly. It is also, done well, a genuine opportunity.
The people who build D2C channels from scratch in businesses that have never sold direct before, tend to become the people who understand the operation more completely than anyone else in the building. That understanding has real value, inside your current business and outside it.
The trick is surviving the first six months with enough support around you to do it properly.
