Greg Young is Head of Customer Experience at Infigo. He has spent sixteen years watching print businesses launch storefronts, and watching which ones regret how they did it. Here’s the pattern he sees most often, and the question that avoids it.
I have a phrase I use so often with customers that it has become a bit of a trademark: configuration paralysis.
It describes something I have watched happen for sixteen years. A business commits to launching a storefront, and then keeps making changes to it based on personal preference. The launch date slips. Then it slips again. A button being blue instead of orange becomes a reason to delay. Whether the category page shows four product thumbnails or ten becomes a reason to delay. None of these things matter to the person who will actually use the site. All of them matter enormously to the person building it.
That is the pattern underneath almost every storefront regret I hear: the setup was driven by the needs of the people inside the business, not the needs of the customer placing the order.
Seven months for four per cent
The worst case I have seen was a start-up launching a B2C print brand. They wanted to offer two routes to order: upload a print-ready file, or design online using templates. Sensible enough on paper. But they delayed their launch by seven months to build out a full catalogue of templated designs before going live.
After launch, we sat down together and analysed the ordering data. Ninety-three per cent of orders came through file upload. Four per cent came through the templates they had spent seven months building. The remaining three per cent came through a design-for-me service, where the customer paid the print business’s studio to create the artwork.
Seven months of delay, to serve four per cent of demand.
Based on first-year ordering data from a B2C print brand launch, analysed by Infigo’s Customer Experience team.
The direct cost was painful: for a startup, seven months of lost trading ran to tens of thousands of pounds. The deeper failure went beyond the money. Nobody had properly understood the end user. Their target customer was brands. Brands have marketing teams and design teams who produce print-ready artwork long before they reach an ordering site. That customer wants to upload a file, have it pre-flight checked, and place the order. They were never going to build business cards in an online editor. The business spent seven months constructing an ordering experience for a customer that did not exist, while the customer that did exist waited.
The catalogue that nobody ordered from
If configuration paralysis is the disease, an oversized launch catalogue is its most common symptom. I see it constantly: a business insists on going live with sixty products, when eight well-built products with the right attributes, paper choices, sizes, finishing options, would cover the same ground and get them trading months earlier, with the rest phased in over the following weeks.
Sixty products is not sixty times better than eight. It is sixty things to price, sixty things to proof, sixty things to maintain, and fifty-two more reasons to delay the launch.
Recently I set a customer a task. They were migrating a catalogue of 140 templated products, and I asked them to review the list and give my team a priority order for the rebuild. What they found surprised them, though it did not surprise me: only 36 per cent of those 140 templates had been ordered at all in the previous three years. Almost two thirds of the catalogue was dead weight. Products that were either no longer relevant or never required, and every one of them had, at some point, been a reason the original launch took longer than it should have.
Based on a customer’s three-year order history, reviewed during a template catalogue migration with Infigo’s Customer Experience team.
The pattern repeats because order data always tells the same story: demand concentrates on a handful of products. The long tail does not generate revenue. It generates maintenance.
Where it comes from
Configuration paralysis is a people problem, not a technology one, and in my experience, it comes from two directions at once.
The first is the owner, of the business, or of the account, striving for perfection. But perfection defined by their own parameters, not the customer’s. Their storefront is a reflection of their brand and their standards, and they cannot bring themselves to launch something that is not finished in their eyes. The customer, meanwhile, would happily order from a site that is 80 per cent polished and 100 per cent live.
The second, often stronger, force is the product champion: the person responsible for building the site, who wants to deliver the best storefront they possibly can. Their commitment is real and their intentions are good. But the site they are building is their vision of excellent, not the end user’s. Nobody in that dynamic is careless. They are being diligent about the wrong things, and diligence about the wrong things is very hard to argue with from the inside.
The cost that lingers
When customers look back on these projects, two costs sting.
The first is the revenue that was never earned. Every month of delay is trading that never happened, and unlike a budget overrun, it never shows up on an invoice. Nobody signs off on it. It accumulates.
The second cost is harder to measure and lasts longer. Internally, the storefront becomes “the project that dragged”. It creates friction between departments. It leaves a bad taste, and, fairly or not, that taste often attaches to the supplier, even when the supplier gave clear professional advice that went unheeded. I have watched businesses lose their appetite for the next phase of investment. The launch experience exhausted them, even though the platform itself worked. The wrong first project does not just cost you its own delay. It costs you the willingness to do the second one properly.
What I have learned from sitting on the other side of hundreds of these launches is that the storefronts that succeed are almost never the ones that launched perfect. They are the ones that launched, then let their customers tell them what perfect actually looks like through real orders and real data.
The businesses that regret their storefront decisions were not short of effort. They were short of one question, asked early enough and honestly enough: Who is this site actually for?
This isn’t the first mistake print businesses make before launch. The piece that comes before it: How Commercial Printers Choose the Wrong Software (and How to Get It Right). Read the article.
