If you are a startup ecommerce business, you should probably not spend a lot of time on your fulfillment processes to make sure they are highly efficient. Instead, you should probably invest your time and money in understanding your target market and in selecting products that consumers will likely buy. When you are in survival mode, your highest point of risk is getting the product mix and target market to match. If you fail at that, you will have minimal revenue and your business will likely fail when you run out of seed capital.
As you become operationally mature, you will want to focus more on your operational efficiencies. You will now have employees, vendors, and infrastructure challenges. Your revenue stream should be more predictable and you will have a web presence and customers to help minimize your risk of revenue loss. But, if you do not install efficient processes and focus on cost containment, your business could be at risk from poorly managed cash flow, bad customer services, or inventory or supply chain problems. During this phase, it's time to focus on your business operations — to reduce your risk and increase your profits.
As your business moves into the scalable business phase, you'll have achieved operational efficiencies and have an organization in place. Those risks will now be under control. Now, you can focus on scaling the business. Your new goals will include staying relevant in your market and continuing your growth. Risk will include raising and investing capital in new products, acquisitions, or vertical and horizontal integrations.
The point is, your core challenges, and how you respond to them, will be different as your company grows. Here is a table that depicts a few of the challenges, along with how your planning and strategies will change based on where you are in the lifecycle.
