E-commerce retailers and startups have been warned that the Black Friday and festive shopping rushes could end up damaging their operations instead of benefitting them.

Online business experts say thousands of eager retailers – including an army of Amazon and eBay shops set up during the pandemic – are ill-prepared and should proceed with extreme caution lest they get caught out by software shortcomings.

Gillian Livingstone, Chief Operating Officer of East Kilbride-based cloud software experts Eureka Solutions, said: “This is a trap that many e-commerce businesses fall into. People assume that new digital tools mean it is going to be straightforward. They get lulled into a false sense of optimism.

“It’s true there are some brilliant software tools out there for accountancy, book-keeping, customer acquisition, tracking orders and more. Each of them can be transformative in their own right.

“The problem is that these tools rarely speak to each other or integrate particularly well. We spend our working lives dealing with entrepreneurs and business people who had hoped for a smooth and hassle-free digital business – only to get bogged down by these issues.

“In the worst cases, they end up employing staff or even teams of people to manually transfer information between different, business-critical applications, which defeats the entire purpose.”

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Problems not only hit the behind-the-scene operations, Livingstone said they can also cause a wide range of issues for customers which can be catastrophic for online and e-commerce operators.

She added: “Common problems are that items will show as being in stock, but when it comes to ordering they aren’t, which is hugely frustrating for shoppers. Another problem is promising delivery within a specific time, when in fact it isn’t possible.

“Online vendors only get one chance. These types of problems ensure a customer will never come back. It’s the equivalent of going to a corner shop to be greeted by disorganised shelves, overwhelmed staff and a lack of customer service.”

Livingstone fears that this year’s Black Friday and festive rushes are going to be particularly painful for a cohort of new online sellers, who started selling on eBay, or platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, during the pandemic.

She added: “There are thousands of people who lost or quit jobs due to Covid and set up online stores because eBay and other platforms offer some fantastic tools and incentives. But when sales kick up a gear, so do the challenges with keeping track of orders, invoices and fulfilment.

“Black Friday and the festive season offer the lure of amazing sales, but for many it is more likely to be a painful lesson in the reality of just how many things can go wrong.”

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