This is the core thesis of a company like Shopify. Shopify will run everything else about being an e-commerce company (website, inventory, shipping, returns, ads, sales channels, etc) and then the merchant can focus on selling their product. But this is part of the larger thesis about running a business you hear in business school classes, to focus on your specialization and outsource your non-core expertise. Buy Workday/ADP/Paychex don't do payroll or HR. Don't build a data center, buy AWS/Azure/GCP. Don't build a sales database or marketing get Hubspot or Salesforce. Does your company take in a lot of mail? Outsource to a company that specializes in processing mail. Outsource your Technical Helpdesk. Outsource your customer support. This is why componentization is accelerating.
> to focus on your specialization and outsource your non-core expertise
Most retailers will argue that connecting with their core customers and delivering delightful experiences to them is their core expertise.
More practically, it will be tension between things like "our marketing department wants X on the site for summer" and "Shopify is planning on launching X in January." It will be less of a resistance to using a third-party provider and more that the third-party provider imposes constraints on the mode of contact with customers. That's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of consumer-focused companies.
> Most retailers will argue that connecting with their core customers and delivering delightful experiences to them is their core expertise.
Having worked in e-commerce for most of my career, for individual retailers, I can assure you that the perpetual tension you describe is real. The problem as I see it is, every little retailer thinks that their two-bit designers and product managers are so uniquely visionary in designing interactions that they rightfully should have full control over the product that is the ecommerce website. Shopify employs God-knows-how-many engineers to build and maintain this experience, and probably thousands of SREs to be there 24/7 making sure a random DDOS or slow query doesn't take your site out. "But we think we can build a better site than Shopify with 10 engineers and a couple of managers," they say.
They can build one that has the 3 cute whiz-bang features that their self-important product design staff thinks matter, but it will be unreliable, and they won't have sufficient expertise to get right the other 90% of what a "good" ecom site should have. And on top of it all, none of those gimmicks will likely improve conversion or order value enough to be worth doing.
The smarter ones IMHO do use Shopify. It lacks so many things in its core that it's infuriating (decent search, any nontrivial filtering), but retailers who use it mostly patch over those flaws with plugins sold by third parties (which often introduce ghastly single points of failure that you have no visibility into, and you can't sue some random plugin vendor you pay $50 a month for your site going down on Black Friday).
Ecommerce is hard tbh. But I do personally think that most of my previous employers probably should have done lightweight Shopify skins and made their core competence sourcing, merchandising, and advertising product rather than designing cute search filters, or their own product recommendations algorithm.
Have done a few turns through e-commerce over the years, and I agree 100% with you.
That said, in the context of a Marks & Spencer-sized company (~$13B revenue), it absolutely can be a competitive advantage to in-house e-commerce if it is resourced & staffed appropriately. They are talking about a £300m hit to profit, so they appear to have some headroom for running a complex site.
Doing in-house gives the opportunity for a company to fix the kinds of things you mention with dodgy plugins etc. It also lets them take advantage of Doing Things Our Way, which sounds silly until you consider that Doing Things Our Way is how they got to be so big. And of course, in-house builds are still allowed to use off-the-shelf software where it makes sense.
Also DIY allows companies to adopt new stuff at their own pace. This tends to be important at times of tech transition like it appears we are now reentering.
Will reiterate that e-commerce is hard & there are really no easy answers.
To be clear, I definitely agree that retailers on the scale of Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Macy's, etc. (probably M&S then? I don't know Britain well) probably have the budget and justification to in-house the ecom website if they have the appetite for it, and indeed, given how unique their needs are are relative to the median site served by the likes of Shopify or even the average customer of the "enterprise" platforms like ATG... they're likely to be able to see a positive ROI on it, unless they screw it up big time.
I guess the question is whether e-commerce should be a core competency of a business with a significant e-commerce business.
I’m not sure what it’s like in the US, but grocery delivery is a reasonably big deal in the UK.