This could just be because so few people talking about ecommerce have any experience of selling anything through that channel. They're concentrating on the channel as a novelty, rather than as a suplementary or superseding channel amongst many. On the other hand, it could be because the ecommerce climate of opinion that currently reigns, softened and homogenised as it is by acres of hype, is so heavy with the revolutionary spin associated with the channel that it hasn't absorbed the implications of revolution on business process. For the fact of the matter is that successful ecommerce is only partly about nifty technology. Ecommerce changes the companies it alights upon.
Fulfilment is perhaps the most live issue facing enterprises who are committing to ecommerce.
It's not difficult to throw a product catalogue up on the web. But it's very hard to scale your production and distribution efforts up and down to meet unpredictable new demands. Yet it's the people, practices and processes that your ecommerce efforts touch upon that bear the brunt of the change. As we begin to tire of the novelty of ecommerce, we'll hear more groans about its inability to deliver on its promises. When that happens, be sure to widen the net before condemning the company's high-profile ecommerce system project out of hand.