A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be? Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a little different. Then actual delivery need to be scheduled on the phone. Every time. The pallets don't fit in the elevator after all, so need men to move boxes. Someone need to dispose of the pallets. The building doesn't have large item disposal. To assemble 60 desks we need men, tools, floor-plan, access to the building, etc. Someone has to clean up the packaging material. Then of course one of the 60 boxes were dropped, now damaged and needs replacing. Sending one box is a different game than sending 60. Even if you know what you are doing it takes a lot of emails and phone calls to outfit an office with furniture, and somehow everyone wants to communicate over phone or email, so automation is impossible. And that's how my e-commerce company turned into a service business wiped out all my profits :) (edited for typos)