Your Shopify store is not your business

And Brian's spreadsheet works great, until it doesn't

I talk to 8-10 brand founders a week. The conversation almost always starts the same way: “We’re growing fast, things are kind of breaking, and we need to figure out our operations.” Then I ask: “Where does your inventory truth live right now?” And the answer — almost without exception — is some version of: “Well, Shopify has some of it, our 3PL has some of it, we have a spreadsheet that Brian updates every Monday, and the Amazon numbers are FBA so honestly, I’m not sure if they should count or not.”

This is not a failure of the founder. This is a failure of the tools. And it’s so common that I’ve stopped being surprised by it — which, if you think about it, is the wildest part.

Here’s what I’ve learned after building a brand from my kitchen table to local shops to national retail to an exit, and working with hundreds of brands at Mvnifest and Endless Commerce: the operational infrastructure behind your brand matters more than the storefront in front of it. And most founders figure this out too late — right around the time a major retailer sends their first routing guide and the chargeback clock starts ticking.

The Shopify gap

Shopify is genuinely great at what it does. It’s the best storefront on the planet for getting a brand from zero to $3M. No argument. But Shopify is organized around the transaction — the sale, the order, the checkout. The product is secondary. And somewhere between $5M and $15M, that distinction starts to matter a lot.

When you’re doing DTC only, the transaction view is fine. An order comes in, it ships, done. But the moment you add wholesale — a Target PO, a Nordstrom EDI feed, a Williams-Sonoma routing guide — you need a fundamentally different kind of truth. You need to know: what is this product, where is it, how much do we have committed vs. available, and what’s coming in on which purchase order?

Shopify can’t answer that. Not because it’s bad — because it’s not what Shopify was built to do. It’s like asking your car to also be a boat. Technically you could try, but woof.

The spreadsheet era

So what happens? The founder hires an ops person (OMG you guys, I hired my husband for this that’s how desperate I was). The ops person (my husband) builds a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet (thanks Brian!) works for six months. Then it doesn’t — because spreadsheets don’t talk to EDI feeds, don’t reconcile with 3PL warehouse counts, and definitely don’t send ASNs to Target on time.

Then it’s chargebacks. Then it’s compliance penalties buried in deductions. Then it’s a Sunday night spent reconciling three sources of inventory data and hoping the numbers match by Monday morning.

(I’ve lived this. Multiple times. It’s not a good Sunday. Brian and I did not have fun.)

The thing that actually fixes it

The fix is a different architectural foundation entirely — one built around the product record as the source of truth. When the product is your source of truth, everything else becomes a view: orders are a view, fulfillment is a view, demand planning is a view. They’re all looking at the same reality instead of maintaining separate, contradictory versions of it.

Brian made his spreadsheet as rad as it could be, we built an insanely powerful PIM (product information management, look it up it’s interesting), then we graduated to building that into the core feature of actual ops software, because we’re opinionated and generous and have an unignorable itch to share our brainchild with the world.

This is the thesis we built Endless Commerce on — and I’m not going to turn this Saturday reflection into a product pitch, so I’ll just say: if your operational stack is organized around transactions instead of items, you’re going to hit a ceiling. And sure, the timing varies. But there’s a ceiling, somewhere, no matter what.

Anyhow, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’ve just outgrown the tools that got you here. That’s actually a good sign. It means you’re building something real.

The fix isn’t complicated. It just requires making the unsexy infrastructure investment before you have to, instead of after it’s already cost you.

xoxo, Chaos