# The store is the hub

Field notes / 05

An online store is never only a store. It feeds the ad platforms, the marketplaces, the CRM, the newsletter and the resellers’ own shelves, and it is fed by all of them. The names of the tools change every few years. The connections between them stay, and they are what a commerce lead has to understand.

## What I learned the hard way

1. **Know what each channel is for.** Brand awareness, direct sales, resellers stocking up, a marketplace listing. Each has its own measure of success. Judge them all by last-click revenue and you will switch off the useful ones.
2. **Measure return where the money is spent.** Paid search and paid social need the order value sent back to the ad platform. Without that link you are optimising for clicks.
3. **The product feed is a product.** The merchant listings, the marketplaces and the comparison sites all live off your feed. Its titles, images, stock and prices deserve the same care as the store itself.
4. **A marketplace is a channel with its own rules.** Fulfilled by the marketplace or by you, drop-shipped or from stock: each choice changes the margin, the stock and who owns the customer. Decide per product range, not once for everything.
5. **The CRM closes the loop.** Leads, special requests, quotes and abandoned carts belong in one place, where somebody follows up. An abandoned-cart email is often the cheapest sale you will make.
6. **Give resellers and consumers different doors.** A reseller stocking up online and a consumer buying one item need different prices, catalogues and service, often on the same platform. It works when each side sees only its own door.
7. **Offer something the other shelves do not have.** A special edition, or a product from the same range that is hard to find elsewhere, gives people a reason to buy from you directly.
8. **The tools are replaceable. The data that flows between them is not.** Pick tools the team can run, keep the identifiers and the events clean, and you can change any one of them later.

Diagram: The store in the middle, linked in both directions to ads and social, marketplaces, the CRM and email, resellers, analytics and the product feed.

## The tools change. The links stay.

- **Marketing and email:** Marketo, Mailchimp
- **Analytics:** Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Hotjar
- **Advertising:** Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok Shop
- **Product feeds:** Google Merchant
- **Marketplaces:** Amazon (fulfilled by them or by you), Mirakl, Temu, AliExpress
- **CRM:** Salesforce

## Tips and tricks

- Tag every campaign the same way from the first day.
- Send the order value back to the ad platforms.
- Check the product feed every week, the way you would check a shop window.
- Keep one customer identifier across the store, the CRM and email.
- Review each channel against its own goal.
- Patch every layer, from the operating system to the JavaScript framework.

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