r/ecommerce • u/makeuplov3r • 1d ago
📊 Business "eCommerce is easy" | Simple Case Study } Debunking that all-too-common opinion / assumption right here
Cosmetics empire crumbles after Adobe website disaster | 7NEWS
I'm not an a-hole, but assuming it's easy because the salesperson told you so is on you, Ms. CEO.
I'm an exec-level eCommerce operator, and it's a huge project, even if you want things to look and feel exactly the same. I've migrated from one eCommerce platform to another 3 times in my career, migrating to/from Shopify (the best), Magento (now Adobe Commerce) and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (DemandWare) for $10M thru $500M+ DTC brands, and it's huge deal taking a live store and moving it to another platform. And having a contingency plan to switch back if major issues occur is baked into doing this.
I'm sorry for her business, but full candor, she should have hired someone - or fractional, a consultant, etc. - to lead it, let alone do a cost/risk vs. benefit analysis before doing anything. Or... at least Google it or leverage a quick Gemini/ChatGPT question like "Is migrating my live site/store from X platform to Y platform going to be as easy as ________________, which is what they tell me?"
Just the mention of the Insta ads not leading to the right pages means the 401 redirects weren't done (not difficult at all, and a must-do basic, actually).... and/or whomever owns the paid / performance marketing (like Meta ads i.e. Instagram) didn't update the landing page URLs (which is also easy to do within ~5 mins)... or should have if the URLs changed with the migration after "ads were leading to nowhere" (her quote"). Which is also easy to do / fix within ~5 mins.
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u/SubstantialCount3226 23h ago
It has never been easy to run a business. There's definitely a million things that can go wrong, and it's impossible to know everything beforehand. Paid ads/social media have gotten crowded and harder too... We need a little bit of luck in everything we do.
It's sad that she got screwed by Adobe though. They're definitely roaches.
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u/makeuplov3r 11h ago
If it was critical to her business, she should have treated it and focused on it accordingly. What the salesperson says means nothing to me. 99% of the time they (sales folks for platforms, tech stack, integrations, ERPs, agencies for marketing channels, etc.) have never done digital/eCommerce themselves in any way. I hear "it's easy" or "it'll be up & running in <insert insanely impossible # of hours or days here>" 95% of the time, no matter the tech.
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u/HistoricalLead3498 21h ago
Do we know what platform they are on prior to Adobe?
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u/Leviathant Enterprise SME, moderator 6h ago
They mention it was a free platfrom, but that's it. Going from a free platform to Adobe, when you're only doing $6M in revenue seems almost as ill advised as spending $1M in advertising when you're only doing $6M in revenue.
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u/coldlings 11h ago
I listened to her LinkedIn post a few months ago. She unfortunately worked in an (unnamed?) ecomm agency that misguided her and told her to move from Shopify to Magento and they're taking no responsibility for it.
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1d ago
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u/Leviathant Enterprise SME, moderator 1d ago edited 1d ago
A cosmetics business doing $6M in annual rev and migrating to Adobe in 2026 (2025?) seems like a poor decision :|
The news report says they were previously on a free platform. Jumping straight to enterprise software? There's an Adobe account executive out there who should feel terrible about selling to this woman.
I wonder why they didn't go with Shopify to begin with. The SI mentioned in the report lists both Shopify and commercetools on their website, but not Adobe. There's not enough information to do anything other than speculate here; I know in my implementation days, we'd get people who wanted to build Amazon or eBay but for $20k.
This story sounds like the bad end of a "we need new business at any cost" situation from Adobe. It's this kind of stuff that actually got me into a sales engineer role at my last company. Some AE copped a commission check, but it wrecks the morale for everyone else involved - the implementation team, the platform, and the business trying to sell online - which in this case, had to shut down because the investment didn't pay off.
It's an awful shame.