https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/apr/19/business....
But they eventually took control back, so it clearly didn't work for them:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/18/marks-spenc...
M&S orders still use the same ###-#######-####### order number format as Amazon, so I'm not sure if it's still some sort of fork of whatever white-label Amazon technology they were using back then.
I'm not sure if getting Amazon to run your own ecomerce website is really the greatest idea in the long term (Amazon kinda want your customers to use Amazon, not your website), but M&S using them isn't as mad as that bit in the early 2000's where Waterstone's website was just a subsection of Amazon.co.uk.
Amazon has a clear conflict of interest with anyone in e-commerce. Shopify is probably a better example.
Warehousing and delivery is probably contracted out to another third-party
My guess is it’s one of these that’s been hacked
I’m not sure what it’s like in the US, but grocery delivery is a reasonably big deal in the UK.
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.
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.
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.
Their approach was to sell the UK operation to Tata in 2018 and piss everyone off until they leave and replace them with Indian staff to save costs over time.
You get what you pay for. They're now paying for it.
As an example of Tata’s general competency, Tata owns Jaguar Range Rover group which reported their best profit in a decade for the fiscal year ending March 31.
It’s certainly very possible for any help desk to be an attack vector regardless of the nationality of the employee.
So it seems to me the main point of your comment is to hate on an Indian company solely for being Indian and to stereotype Indian companies as low quality and low cost.
Tata Consultancy is a global company that includes offices in places like Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta.
We can all pick and choose good stories. What about Tata Steel's total mismanagement of Tata Steel Europe? And JLR isn't exactly in good shape as you say it is. You just picked some numbers that sound good. And wrapped it in a xenophobia straw man.
First part is a reasonable assumption, the second is not, and this is what’s opening you up to allegations of xenophobia.
The allure (and promise) of outsourcing is the idea that you can pay less for a comparable service due to the cost of living disparity between your location and the outsourcing provider. Whether any individual provider achieves that or not is another question, but saying “if your service is provided from India you are not concerned about quality”, or “if your service is provided from India you will have a constant cycle of low quality staff” does sound a lot like xenophobia.
> No one there wants to work for those outsourcing chop shops
This is simply not true. There are a lot of benefits to working for a company like this, although as with any company, it’s not all upside. Of course turnover is high because you have a lot of entry level folks. Regardless of where you are in the world, no-one wants to work a level one help desk until they retire.
> We can all pick and choose good stories. What about Tata Steel's total mismanagement of Tata Steel Europe? And JLR isn't exactly in good shape as you say it is. You just picked some numbers that sound good.
Yeah odd example, JLR is not doing great, and Tata Steel is also struggling, but overall the Tata Group are doing well.
The problem is crap people are cheaper in India than crap people elsewhere. And that looks good on the balance sheet.
And as we’re about maximising shareholder value these days then that’s fine apparently.
That's not really the case though. You can get access to very highly educated, talented folks in India for cheaper than you can get access to similar resources elsewhere because labour markets aren't equal and cost-of-living differences are a factor.
> The problem is crap people are cheaper in India than crap people elsewhere. And that looks good on the balance sheet.
True, I'm not arguing that India isn't cheaper, and it is true that if you want to hire crap people, you might as well hire cheap crap people compared to expensive crap people.
I don't want to put the cart before the horse though: you're assuming that a company outsourcing to India prioritises cost over quality, which simply isn't true.
Preventing security breaches has a lot more to do with process design and implementation versus the choice of handling that process in-house or externally. For all you know the breach was completely the fault of the M&S implementation as set up by employees in the UK (e.g., M&S gave their contractor in India access/credentials that were too generous and could have been tightened up far more in retrospect).
Remember that basically every company with an online presence is depending on third-party data brokers, and those companies operate around the globe, which is why accusing India of being low quality just because it's India is so xenophobic/racist/nationalist.
I would also say it is very obvious to me that you almost certainly wouldn't be making the same comments if M&S had outsourced to a customer service firm in Ireland or Scotland.
And wow, Tata mismanaged Tata Steel Europe. Guess what? US Steel mismanaged US Steel. General Electric mismanaged probably more than half of its entire business. So what's your point? Any company in any country can be mismanaged. It's actually really hard to manage a business perfectly for a long period of time. Singling out Indian companies for being Indian is basically the definition of xenophobia/racism/nationalism.
Basically by your exact same logic you're asking Walmart and Target to outsource their websites, which is completely insane.
No, because Walmart website being down for months is just unthinkable. If a company is so incompetent/resource deficient/use your favorite phrase to describe it/ that their e-commerce is down for a month and outlook is it will be down for more time, then something is seriously wrong with the company. Such companies are 100% going to have a much better experience with Shopify.
> If one of your core businesses is selling clothes online, and you're a large enough entity, you should write your own software to sell clothes online.
If only this was so easy. For various reasons writing non trivial software is hard, and unless these companies can make some structural changes to hire and retain very good engineers (which also is hard for various reasons for these companies), they simply have no chance of doing better than shopify.
If I buy a car and I happen to crash it on the first day I drove it home, that doesn't mean I made the wrong choice to buy the car that day. I still bought the car based on the best information I had at the time.
M&S basically lost a lottery ticket type of bad luck scenario where they are dealing with a breach that is far, far worse than a typical data breach's impact.
Remember when the PlayStation Network was down for over a month due to a very serious breach? That breach didn't prove that PlayStation should have used some kind of external provider for its online services. In fact, an external provider for that sort o thing is not even practical for their business.
Remember, there's an alternate timeline where Shopify itself could be breached in a similarly severe way and also go down for 3 months. It's very unlikely but it's possible. If it can happen to M&S it could happen to Shopify.