The business problem
E-commerce looks simple when the person browsing is the person buying, paying and receiving the product.
That was not our world.
The ecosystem had manufacturers, channel partners, retailers, professionals, influencers and end consumers.
The person discovering a product might not be the person placing the order.
The person placing the order might not be the one paying.
The person paying might not be the final user.
Inventory could sit with different sellers.
Prices could vary by geography or commercial arrangement.
Some products required advice before purchase.
Some transactions were straightforward.
Others depended on a local fulfilment network.
This made the standard e-commerce mental model incomplete.
We were not simply building an online store.
We were trying to design commerce across an ecosystem.
The product approach
The Happy State
The ideal experience had to preserve the convenience people expected from digital commerce without pretending the existing channel did not exist.
A user should be able to discover the right product.
Understand whether it suited the requirement.
Know what it would approximately cost.
Identify where it was available.
Place an order or express purchase intent.
Get routed to the correct fulfilment path.
Track what happened next.
The journey looked like:
Discover → Decide → Order → Route → Fulfil → Support → Re-engage
The key word was route.
In a B2B2C model, commerce was not always about replacing the channel.
Often it was about intelligently connecting digital demand with the right channel.
Product Thinking: What Are We Actually Disrupting?
One of the first questions we had to answer was uncomfortable but important.
If digital commerce succeeds, who loses?
If the answer is “our existing channel”, then adoption resistance is not a communication problem.
It is rational behaviour.
So the objective could not simply be to bypass the offline network.
We needed to understand where digital genuinely added value and where the physical channel remained structurally important.
Digital was strong at discovery, comparison, lead capture, repeat ordering, recommendations, visibility and convenience.
The channel was strong at local relationships, inventory, credit, fulfilment, product advice and last-mile execution.
The product strategy therefore became less about online versus offline and more about how the two could work as one commercial system.
That led to a different architecture.
Designing the Solution
Discovery
Users needed to find products through needs, not only catalogue structures.
The business might internally organise products by category, SKU, plant or business unit.
A customer thinks differently.
They think:
What do I need for this room?
How much material will I require?
Which product is suitable for this application?
What is the price range?
Can I get it nearby?
Decision Support
For some categories, product selection is itself a problem.
The objective was to reduce uncertainty before the transaction.
Transaction
Checkout was not always the final goal.
Depending on the product and region, the best next step could be direct purchase, dealer routing, lead creation, assisted sales or request for quotation.
This required the platform to support multiple transaction patterns without confusing the user.
Fulfilment
Inventory visibility and fulfilment logic became critical.
The digital interface could not promise what the physical network could not deliver.
Post-Purchase Experience
The journey did not end at payment.
Order updates, support, returns, issue resolution, repeat purchase and complementary-product recommendations were part of the same product experience.
What made it difficult
The first challenge was channel conflict.
Any digital commerce initiative in a channel-led business needs to answer a basic question:
Who owns the customer?
Different stakeholders can answer that differently.
The consumer may believe they own their relationship with the brand.
The dealer may believe they own the commercial relationship.
The sales team may believe the account belongs to their territory.
The digital team may see the user as a platform customer.
All of these views can coexist.
The product had to avoid creating a system where one participant's gain automatically looked like another participant's loss.
Pricing was another complex area.
In traditional e-commerce, the platform usually knows what the product costs.
In a distributed channel, actual selling price may depend on geography, partner economics, quantity, delivery, credit and local market conditions.
Inventory created similar complexity.
A product being listed digitally did not mean it was physically available at the right location.
And then there was attribution.
If a user discovered a product online but purchased through a dealer two days later, did digital commerce succeed?
A simplistic conversion model would say no.
A business model would say yes.
Measurement therefore needed to reflect the actual ecosystem rather than only conventional website analytics.
Implementation
We started by identifying use cases where digital could create measurable value without requiring the entire commercial system to change at once.
The product roadmap was prioritised around user friction and business feasibility.
Some journeys could be completely digital.
Others intentionally remained assisted.
As the product matured, the focus expanded from transaction completion to full-funnel performance.
We looked at traffic quality, product discovery, search success, calculator / recommendation usage, lead creation, add-to-cart, checkout completion, partner routing, order conversion, repeat purchase, revenue influenced and revenue directly transacted.
This distinction between revenue transacted and revenue influenced was particularly important in a B2B2C environment.
Digital could create commercial value without necessarily collecting the payment itself.
What this work reinforces
The project changed the way I think about e-commerce.
For a pure digital business, the objective is often to remove intermediaries and reduce friction.
In an established channel business, intermediaries may actually be part of the value proposition.
They provide local inventory, trust, service, credit and fulfilment.
The better question is not:
How do we replace the channel with digital?
It is:
Which parts of the customer journey become better when digital and the channel behave as one system?
That question leads to very different product decisions.
And perhaps that is the broader lesson.
Digital transformation does not always mean destroying the old model.
Sometimes it means finding the parts that already work, connecting the parts that do not, and quietly changing where the intelligence sits.