Ecommerce has exploded over the last decade, with digital native brands pioneering new products, business models, and customer experiences. Online retailers like Warby Parker, Bonobos, FIGS, and many more have carved out enviable market positions seemingly overnight.
However, behind the scenes, most successful digitally-born retail brands share a common challenge in their early days: outgrowing entry-level systems like QuickBooks and Shopify Plus at breakneck speed.
Once you hit $10 million to $20 million in revenue, the limitations of those platforms quickly stall growth by restricting inventory/order volumes, preventing omnichannel distribution, and hindering scalability. Missing out on sales due to lack of inventory or shipping delays is inevitable without enterprise-class architecture that can expand seamlessly.
This makes choosing the right ecommerce ERP an existential decision that either supercharges growth or kneecaps it when transaction volumes hit inflection points.
In this article, we’ll look at:
– Key challenges high-growth ecommerce retailers face
– Benefits of upgrading to NetSuite
– How to future-proof scalability with NetSuite
– Tips for evaluating ERPs for your ecommerce brand
Key Challenges for High-Growth Ecommerce Brands
Rapid sales growth brings both tremendous opportunity and immense complexity for digital retailers. Supply chain strain, inventory stockouts, platform bottlenecks, order orchestration failures, and declining customer loyalty plague retailers that cling to inadequate systems for too long.
Common growing pains for booming ecommerce merchants include:
- Inventory shortfalls – Demand forecasting limitations on entry-level platforms lead to frequent stockouts, substituting customer orders, and missed revenue during peak seasons.
- Platform bottlenecks – Volume caps on transactions, bandwidth, and data storage throttle growth velocity on lower-tier commerce platforms.
- Order failures – Lack of order orchestration causes order failures during high-volume lead-ins to peak seasons by failing to interface inventory, payment processors, and shipping systems.
- Poor visibility – Siloed visibility across retail channels, inventory, and order/delivery status keeps retailers flying blind.
- Limited omnichannel – Bolting on standalone POS, BOPUS, or mobile commerce hampers flexibility as new channels emerge.
- Complexity overload – Tactically adding new tools to band-aid limitations exponentially increases systems complexity over time.
- Lack of customization – Growing brands often need deeply customized experiences and processes catered to their business model, which turnkey platforms restrict.
Scaling up to an enterprise-class platform is essential once ecommerce merchants hit the $10M+ revenue mark. Next we’ll explore how NetSuite empowers unlimited scaling.
NetSuite’s Capabilities for Scalable Growth and Peak Efficiency
Originally created as an ERP platform for fast-scaling product companies, NetSuite’s DNA makes it uniquely suited for high-velocity ecommerce brands. Its cloud-native architecture allows limitless, rapid transactions and seamless scaling to accommodate fast business growth.
With NetSuite, retailers gain benefits like:
- Rapid deployment – NetSuite is cloud-native and modular for faster rollout than legacy ERPs with months-long implementations
- Omnichannel orchestration – Centrally manage orders, inventory, and customers across all integrated channels and touchpoints
- Unlimited scalability – Cloud infrastructure and open API accommodate rapidly increasing sales volumes without bottlenecking
- Customization – Flexible platform enables custom experiences, workflows, and processes aligned to unique business models
- Unified data – Single source of truth for inventory, orders, customers, and other data across the organization
- Visibility – Real-time reporting and role-based dashboards centralize data insights across finance, retail, inventory, and more
For high-growth retailers, the ultimate imperative is ensuring today’s ERP choice facilitates rather than hinders ambition to hit $100 million, $500 million, and beyond in record time.
Next we’ll explore strategies for architecting true scalability into your retail technology stack with NetSuite.
Architecting Omnichannel Retail with NetSuite
The most scalable architecture is also the most flexible—retailers shouldn’t have to tactically bolt on new sales or fulfillment channels after the fact or migrate between platforms every few years.
The optimal foundation combines order management, inventory management, POS, and ecommerce natively into a single cloud platform built for omnichannel retail.
This enables emerging retailers to quickly activate and iterate on any channel from mobile apps to marketplaces to pop-up stores without adding complexity.
With open APIs, retailers can also integrate exciting innovations for contextual commerce without disrupting their tech stack. This makes launching new business models or shopping experiences far simpler.
With their core retail workflows and data models centralized in NetSuite, launching new customer touchpoints became exponentially easier.
The key is choosing a cloud platform designed specifically to unify data and processes with enough built-in flexibility to adapt as strategic priorities shift.
Tips for Evaluating ERP Solutions for Emerging Ecommerce Leaders
When assessing ERP options as a fast-scaling ecommerce brand, focus on three core aspects:
- Omnichannel agility – How easily does the platform activate and manage new sales channels and touchpoints?
- Customization range – Can you tailor experiences, workflows and rules to our unique business model?
- Scalability track record – Does the vendor have proven experience supporting retailers beyond $500M+ in revenue?
- Avoid overbuying on complexity—opt for the solution that simplifies rather than overwhelms. The most future-proof ERPs center around unified commerce platforms that facilitate growth acceleration rather than inhibiting it.
NetSuite strikes that balance better than any legacy ERP or SMB platform available, giving emerging brands ultimate agility. Unlock limitless scale potential by centralizing retail around an enterprise cloud platform purpose built for speed.
Contact SuiteDynamics to learn more about upgrading to NetSuite or initiating a new NetSuite implementation for your ecommerce brand.
