Many teams begin with pages and features, only to discover later that price is not one field, an order is not one record and inventory is not one number. Business relationships define scope and risk. The following seven questions should produce reviewable decisions before detailed design and engineering begin.
1. Who Sells and Who Buys?
Brand D2C, marketplaces and supply-chain commerce all have products, carts and orders, yet their roles differ completely. Marketplaces need merchant onboarding and governance; supply-chain platforms need suppliers and channel partners. Those roles directly shape data permissions, order liability and workspaces.
2. Who Controls the Price?
Distinguish base, channel, member, contract and promotional prices, then define priority, mutual exclusion, scope and edit permissions. Without a price model, integration often produces the classic failure: the page looks right but settlement is wrong.
3. How Is Inventory Promised?
Available-to-sell stock may come from central warehouses, regional warehouses, stores or suppliers. The system must know when to reserve and release stock, how to reroute shortages, how to split orders and where inventory returns after service.
4. Who Fulfils the Order?
Owned fulfilment, merchant shipping, supplier drop shipping, store pickup and local delivery may coexist. Each needs explicit task triggers, service levels, exception handling and after-sales responsibility—not merely a fulfilment-type field.
5. How Do Funds Move?
Define the collecting entity, payment channels, refund liability, split rules, billing cycles, settlement statements and reconciliation. Marketplace fund flows require joint review by business, finance and engineering.
6. Which Systems Own the Data?
ERP, WMS, CRM, POS and commerce systems cannot all be the master for the same data. Assign ownership, direction, frequency, failure compensation and manual resolution for products, prices, inventory, members, orders and finance.
7. How Will Launch Be Validated?
“The store is live” is only a technical outcome. Define validation metrics for customer journeys, operating efficiency, fulfilment quality, financial accuracy and reliability, with a data source and measurement rule for each.
Turn the Answers Into a Blueprint
The decisions should become role relationships, business flows, rule catalogues, system boundaries and acceptance cases. Feature scope and schedules become reliable only when business, operations, IT and finance share the same model.
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