How To Build An E-commerce Portal That Customers Love

In 2020, PepsiCo brought a pair of direct-to-consumer websites from ideation to launch in just 30 days in an attempt to capture market share as customers moved online during the pandemic. This era saw consumer product companies rush to put up an e-commerce front, but three years on it's clear that many are falling short of customer expectations. Outdated, fragmented, and poorly integrated portals frustrate the consumer. How did so many companies get it wrong?

The vision of e-commerce infrastructure (see figure 1) as merely a digital "portal" for customers misses a crucial piece of the undertaking: e-commerce platforms aren't just an interface, they comprise the full consumer experience, driving offsite brand interactions, consumer awareness, and both online and instore sales. That misconception means that most backend design efforts start by collecting business requirements from business users rather than the consumers who actually use the platforms.