I Thought I Knew eCommerce, until...

There's a specific kind of humbling that happens when you realize your expertise has an expiration date — or at least, a very clear boundary.

I'd spent years at iHerb building mobile apps and websites, optimizing conversion funnels, running A/B tests, and growing revenue. I lived and breathed eCommerce product development. I knew what good looked like. I knew what users wanted. I knew how to ship.

So when I decided to start my own eCommerce business — selling on Amazon and Shopify — I figured I had a serious head start. I had the product instincts. I had the technical chops from my engineering days. I understood the customer journey better than most.

I was right about all of that. And none of it was enough.

The part of eCommerce nobody puts on a roadmap

Within the first few months of running my own store, I encountered a list of problems that had exactly zero to do with product management:

Things PM school didn't cover

• Why is my inventory stuck at an Amazon fulfillment center in Kentucky?

• What do I do when a customer gets the wrong order and leaves a 1-star review at 11pm?

• How do I run paid ads on a budget without burning it in a week?

• Which tax nexus rules apply to my business in which states — and why does this matter so much?

• How do I source products, negotiate with suppliers, and manage lead times?

Marketing. Logistics. Customer service. Tax compliance. Supplier relationships. Packaging decisions. Return policies. None of this was in my wheelhouse. And unlike at iHerb, where I could tag in a specialist for each of these domains, I was the specialist. I was the whole team.

Long hours doesn't quite cover it. There were stretches where I was working mornings before my day job, evenings after my kids were in bed, and weekends that disappeared into spreadsheets and shipping dashboards. And for a while, it felt like I was playing catch-up in every direction at once.

I could build the right product. What I hadn't built yet was the understanding of the business the product was supposed to serve.

The unexpected education

Here's the thing about being thrown into the deep end of operations: you come out the other side with a completely different relationship to every team you'll ever work with again.

I had always respected the people in logistics, marketing, finance, and customer support — I wasn't one of those PMs who thought the product team was the whole show. But respecting someone's work and truly understanding what it takes to do it are two very different things.

After managing my own shipping disputes, running my own ad campaigns, and fielding my own angry customer emails, I didn't just respect those functions — I felt them. I knew exactly how a bad product decision could create a downstream nightmare for an ops team. I knew how a clunky returns flow wasn't just a UX problem, it was a customer service team's daily grind. I knew how a murky pricing strategy made marketing's job nearly impossible.

That knowledge changed how I build products. Forever.

What this means for how I work with clients now

When I partner with eCommerce companies today — whether they're on Shopify, Amazon, or building something custom — I don't just look at the product in isolation. I look at the whole business it's embedded in.

Because a great product strategy for a company with a two-person ops team looks completely different from one for a company with 50 warehouse staff. A checkout optimization that makes sense for a high-margin product line is a different conversation for a business running on thin margins with complex fulfillment. A mobile app feature that delights users can create serious headaches if operations can't support what it promises.

The lesson I now bring to every client

Great digital products don't exist in a vacuum. They work — or fail — inside real businesses, with real teams, real constraints, and real operations behind them. The best PMs I know don't just understand the product. They understand the business the product has to serve. Running my own store forced me to become that kind of PM.

The silver lining of being humbled

I won't pretend those years of 12-hour days and hard-won logistics lessons were comfortable. They weren't. But I'd do it again — because the version of me that came out on the other side is a sharper, more empathetic, more commercially grounded product leader.

I can now sit across from a founder who's juggling marketing, shipping, customer support, and product decisions all at once — and actually meet them where they are. Not with polished frameworks, but with real understanding of what it feels like when all of that is on your plate at the same time.

That empathy isn't something you can get from a product certification or a case study. You have to earn it. For me, I earned it one customer support request at a time.

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