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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

Holy shit why don't they just set up a Shopify

Bureaucracy is almost always the reason. They don't just need a website, they need -their- website back, because it was programmed with a million little business rules and pricing logic and regulatory requirements.

You're surely not wrong that a lot of things would need to be done without, but I'd like to think that if I were 'king of M&S' I could have identified a subset of merchandise that could be loaded into a suitable interim solution like Shopify within say, 4 weeks, if the only other option was forgoing all online sales for 12 weeks +.

That would also take a lot of the pressure off of the "full recovery team."

Of course, the real situation must be 100x more complex than I'm imagining it so "I'd like to think" != "I am confident"

Four weeks? You mean two days???

The real situation is not 100x more complex, it's just that this is happening in Britain where everything is someone else's job and no one has any reason to care about the actual goals and everyone will go home at 5pm. Or, more likely, to the pub.

You have to keep in mind that you'd have to build out actual fulfillment capabilities on a brand new platform (so you need training of a ton of staff on a new system, as well as a bunch of new equipment to print orders from the "temporary" systems in the warehouses/stores hopefully without removing the original systems they're trying to restore), plus who knows what the database backups looked like. Plus inventory is going to be all screwy with sales happening to some degree in stores (what POS is that using? Is it decrementing inventory we can use?) I'd sure not bet my reputation on having a shoppable site up in less than several weeks without knowing if I have at minimum, reasonably accurate catalog and inventory data.

Ah, I see what you mean. I was not thinking about the fulfillment capabilities, logistics, etc. I was thinking about the site itself, which seems like a two-day job.

They already outsourced thier ecomerce offerings- to ocado - and that's up and running.

What remains is mostly logistics - this company runs farms and abertoires, food import and packaging and a network of warehouses and stores. The drop in cots product is SAP.

The whitelabel ecomerce site is kind of an insurance/ legacy thing while ocado is thier shopfront. Presumably they are prioritising what matters, the logistics, and might sunset this part of thier offer anyway.

You really think Shopify scales to a large department store?

The largest enterprise example of a Shopify customer on their marketing website has $500 million in sales.

M&S has an annual revenue of over £10 billion

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