Insights · Case Study · eCommerce scale-up

Scaling a High-Volume US eCommerce Operation

2 min readBy Strahinja Jovanović

How a US eCommerce brand scaled order volume without the operation breaking

The Challenge

A leading US brand in the baby products category was growing, which sounds like a good problem until you run the operation underneath it.

Purchasing, planning, fulfillment and marketing exchanged information through memory and a Friday spreadsheet. That works at low volume. It works because a small number of competent people hold the whole picture in their heads and stay late when it slips.

At 100 orders a day, a mediocre process is an inconvenience someone patches by staying late. At several thousand, the same process is a structural failure with a customer attached to every instance.

The objective was never simply to process more orders. It was to build an operation that could support growth while keeping control.

The Solution

We connected the joints while growth was still a plan rather than a crisis.

Demand planning, international purchasing, imports, Shopify order flow, fulfillment and daily reporting were rebuilt as one system rather than six handoffs. Every place where two functions exchanged information through memory got an explicit interface: a number, an owner, and a time it was expected by.

Across engagements in this category, daily volumes have ranged from 300 to over 4,000 orders a day. The mechanics do not change with volume. What changes is how expensive the missing joints become.

The Results

Key results

  • Operation supported growth from 300 to over 4,000 orders a day across engagements
  • Fewer order errors, and fewer returns with them
  • Planning, purchasing, imports, fulfillment and reporting run as one system, not six handoffs
  • Growth stopped depending on heroics and started depending on process
  • Team led: 18 people, multicultural, across markets

What you can apply

Every place where purchasing, planning, fulfillment and marketing exchange information through memory or a Friday spreadsheet is a joint that will fail at some multiple of today's volume. Connect the joints while growth is still a plan.

About this project

  • Service: End-to-end supply chain build, eCommerce scale-up
  • Industry: US eCommerce, baby products category
  • Scale: 300 to 4,000+ orders per day across engagements
  • Duration: 60 days
The decision this leaves you with

Connect the joints where your functions exchange information through memory while growth is still a plan rather than a crisis.


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