The Hidden Cost of Running Your Website and Shop as Separate Businesses

Launching an online store has never been easier. That doesn't necessarily mean operating one alongside a physical business is easy.

A website can generate sales perfectly well while quietly creating an entirely separate administrative operation behind the scenes.

• Separate products.
• Separate stock.
• Separate orders.
• Separate payments.
• Separate reports.

The business has gained another sales channel — but also another system to manage.

Most businesses don't deliberately design a fragmented setup. It evolves.

• A shop opens first.
• Later, somebody builds a website.
• Then online payments are added.
• Then click & collect.
• Then delivery.
• Then perhaps another marketplace or ordering channel.

Each decision makes sense individually. Five years later, the owner discovers that the business has accumulated a collection of systems that don't really know the others exist.

Suppose you have ten units of a product. Your shop thinks you have ten. Your website also thinks you have ten.

But you don't have twenty. You have ten.

If two systems maintain inventory independently, somebody has to keep them aligned. That can work when order volumes are tiny. As the business grows, it becomes increasingly fragile.

A product sells in the shop but remains available online. A customer orders it. Someone discovers it is no longer in stock. Now the business has created a customer-service problem from what began as a systems problem.

The same issue applies to product information.

• Price changes.
• Descriptions.
• Images.
• Variants.
• Tax information.
• Availability.

If these are managed separately in different systems, ordinary changes become repeated tasks. Change the price in the till. Then change the website. Then perhaps update another sales channel.

The issue isn't that any individual update takes particularly long. It's the repetition.

Online ordering can also create operational friction. Imagine employees spend most of the day inside an EPOS. Website orders arrive by email.

Now somebody needs to notice the email, perhaps print the order, update something else and make sure the sale reaches the appropriate financial records.

Technically, the ecommerce website works. Operationally, it sits outside the business.

A better setup attempts to make digital orders enter a workflow employees already use. That could mean integration with EPOS, order-management software or another central system. The exact architecture depends on the business. The principle remains the same:

A new sales channel should create sales, not another administrative department.

Physical and online payments are frequently purchased at completely different times. The shop has one provider. The website has another gateway. Telephone payments may use something else.

Again, that isn't automatically wrong. But it means reporting, settlement and reconciliation may be spread across multiple systems.

There can be advantages to consolidating parts of the payment stack where appropriate — particularly if doing so improves visibility, settlement or reconciliation. The decision should be based on the whole operation rather than simply obtaining another card-rate quote.

The phrase “connected commerce” can make this sound like a huge enterprise IT project. For an independent business, it shouldn't be. Often the biggest improvements are surprisingly mundane.

• One stock figure instead of two.
• One product update instead of three.
• Orders appearing in the right place.
• Payment totals easier to reconcile.
• Sales reaching the accounts with less manual handling.

Technology is valuable when it makes the operation disappear into the background.

Customers don't think of your website and physical location as separate companies. They see one business. Your systems should increasingly reflect that.

The objective isn't necessarily to force everything onto one platform. It is to make the necessary systems communicate well enough that employees don't have to continually compensate for the gaps.