E-Commerce

The parts that never made it into the process document.

None of this is a technology problem, which is why buying technology has not fixed it.

1. 01

   The shop, the warehouse and the marketplace hold three different stock counts, and the one the customer sees is the one that oversells.

2. 02

   Returns are handled in an inbox, so the same customer is answered twice and the stock comes back into the count late.

3. 03

   A price or listing change is made once per channel, by hand, and one channel is always behind.

4. 04

   Support answers the same twenty questions all day, and the twenty-first is the one that needed a person.

Narrow, boring, and in your environment.

Scoped against a boundary agreed in writing before anything is built, and built in increments you can evaluate one at a time.

• One stock position the channels read from, with the disagreements surfaced rather than silently resolved.
• Returns triaged automatically to a route, with the refund itself left as a decision.
• An agent that drafts the answer to the twenty and hands the twenty-first over with the context already gathered.

What the agent is not allowed to do here.

Every piece of this work has a line the automation does not cross, and it is cheaper to agree it now than to discover it in an incident. These are ours in e-commerce.

• A refund, a chargeback response and a price change are approved by a person.
• Nothing writes to a live listing without a preview of exactly what will change.
• Customer messages are not used to train anything.

The six that apply to every engagement, whatever it is, are on the home page, and what an engagement costs is on pricing.