E-commerce, explained by a practitioner. Automation, AI, growth, and the real mechanics behind them.

An iceberg diagram showing budgeted costs above the waterline and the larger hidden costs of manual operations below: labour, errors, decision delay, and opportunity cost.
Aaron West

The Hidden Cost of Manual Operations

Ask most e-commerce teams what their operations cost, and they will point you to the obvious line items. Software subscriptions. Fulfilment fees. Headcount. What almost nobody can tell you is the cost of the work itself, the hours that disappear every week into copying data…

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Diagram classifying a team's working time into judgment, system-mediated, and transfer tasks, with transfer tasks marked as the first to automate.
Aaron West

How I Think About Automation in E-Commerce

The most expensive automation mistake I see isn't a broken workflow. It's a flawless workflow automating a task that should never have existed in the first place. I've watched smart people spend a weekend building something genuinely impressive. A form that triggers an email, creates…

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