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Between February and March, I met with more than 30 e-commerce owners and leaders from businesses of all sizes across various industries including cosmetics, fashion, beverages, and paint. After years of developing e-commerce solutions at Greencode, I thought there would be nothing new under the sun. I was wrong. While many general trends were familiar, each conversation revealed novel details and perspectives I hadn't considered before.
In summary, these are the main challenges I identified:
Let's dive deeper into each of these challenges.
A well-known e-commerce challenge continues to be one of the greatest hurdles: How do you adapt to each user's specific needs? How do you make each customer feel you're thinking specifically about them?
In simple terms, this means showing each customer something different based on their demographic characteristics and behavior. This has fundamental implications for:
The most advanced e-commerce businesses are developing algorithms that display different layouts and highlight different products based on browsing history, age, location, and user preferences. However, many interviewees expressed that their current platforms have significant limitations in implementing this level of personalization.
Ensuring each customer can find the payment method that works best for them. The more options, the better. While this might seem irrelevant in countries like the United States, it's crucial in places like Argentina.
In Argentina, there are dozens of payment methods, each with its own discounts and promotions depending on the day of the week and product category. The e-commerce businesses that stand out are those that can intelligently display which payment method is most convenient for each customer at any specific moment.
This was one of the topics that surprised me the most. Partly because we had developed a sales and customer service assistant using generative artificial intelligence, and I thought it would be a "no-brainer" for everyone. However, I heard very diverse opinions:
"Let them talk to people": Some companies still strongly defend human customer service. These are typically larger e-commerce businesses with sufficient resources to maintain it. They value the human touch and capacity for empathy that's still difficult to replicate with technology.
"I want to be able to track a single complaint across multiple channels." E-commerce businesses frequently receive inquiries or complaints from the same customer about the same issue across multiple platforms (for example: marketplaces, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). This challenge is one of the most complex to address, given the technical difficulty of identifying users across different platforms.
Within customer service, chatbots deserve special mention:
For some, in an ideal world, they wouldn't exist at all. "I wish my customers never had to ask anyone anything." This statement was one of the most revealing to me and connects directly to customer experience personalization. It reflects that, if possible, e-commerce should be so intuitive and personalized, and should function so well, that no customer service would be necessary. Whether that's possible or not, I found it an inspiring aspiration.
The most sophisticated e-commerce businesses are abandoning mass promotions to adopt personalized discount systems based on:
However, implementing these strategies requires robust data infrastructure and analysis capabilities that many interviewees are still building.
Digital marketing campaign management is another major pain point for e-commerce businesses. Many outsource this service to marketing agencies while others manage it in-house.
For those outsourcing, one of the main challenges is that agencies lack knowledge about business specifics, and knowledge transfer is never perfect. This creates inefficiencies in decision-making and campaigns that don't always reflect the brand essence or specific business needs.
The feedback loop between agencies and e-commerce businesses is slow and intermediated in a context where immediacy is crucial. While the market and consumer behavior change rapidly, campaign adjustment cycles can take days or weeks, resulting in lost opportunities and poorly utilized budgets.
In many cases, it's not possible to make all data available to agencies. With limited information, decisions are necessarily suboptimal. Companies that have managed to create shared dashboards and real-time access to key metrics report significant improvements in marketing campaign efficiency.
This topic deserves a separate article (which I commit to writing in the coming weeks). Not only because of its scope and complexity but also because it permeates all the pain points mentioned in this article.
The key challenges identified were:
There's a fundamental problem of data silos and intermediated information flow. Critical data is often dispersed across:
Integrating these sources remains a significant technical challenge for most companies interviewed.
One of the most valuable insights was discovering that many e-commerce businesses lack clarity about which indicators are truly relevant to their specific type of business. There's a tendency to measure everything possible without focusing on metrics that actually drive strategic decisions.
One of the most mentioned pain areas among the e-commerce businesses I interviewed was catalog management.
The specific problems can be summarized as suppliers providing data and metadata that is:
Another critical point is the quality of visual content:
Companies that have invested in standardizing their visual content report significant improvements in conversion rates.
Product taxonomy and categorization emerge as a constant challenge, especially for e-commerce businesses with extensive catalogs. The difficulty of maintaining a category system that is:
This represents a significant pain point that directly impacts user experience and sales.
Logistics management represents the final critical challenge for the e-commerce businesses interviewed. The most problematic aspects include:
E-commerce businesses that have managed to excel in this aspect are those that have made logistics an integral part of the customer experience, offering personalized delivery options and clear, constant communication about order status.
After these 30 interviews, some clear patterns emerge:
Do you identify with any of these challenges? At Greencode, we've developed specific solutions for each of the challenges mentioned in this article.
