Any wholesale brand wondering how it can grow faster by adding an eCommerce revenue stream (either by marketplace or d2c) has a few obstacles to overcome:

• Likely the brand's existing customers are trading on the brand's behalf on Amazon, perhaps even in FBA/Prime. There is a long and painful journey ahead to clean this up.

• Existing fulfillment centers are almost certainly ill-equipped to ship eaches, much less to deliver on a 2-day (or better) promise.

• eCommerce team is getting low-quality product information, and likely not going to be a lot of help from their "partners" in the Sales organization to build it out further.

• With any large catalog, even assessing which pockets of SKUs to start with is a big challenge. Never mind the fact that SKU-level forecasting needs to be learned to help the warehouse predict their labor calendars!

• Calculating SKU-level margin by channel is likely a new endeavor, because there are so many new costs the organization has never had to account for before.

• The brand's data infrastructure? Likely in the dark ages. Can't make decisions unless they start with data.

All of this needs executive alignment or the eCommerce team needs a strong leader able to call in favors.