Five Ways ERP-Led eCommerce Projects Fail, and How Buyers Can Avoid Them
You’ve selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 and an ERP partner, and the firm has offered to do your eCommerce or ordering portal as an add-on project. But ERP experiences that work for the back office team don’t always meet the commerce expectations of customers, the public, and now AI.
While the context in 2026 is unique, I have seen ERP customers make the same mistake since the early days of eCommerce. In 2005 I helped close two deals as the eCommerce partner alongside two NAV partners. After the sale, the ERP partners hired their own people to build the sites. It didn’t work out, and they all quit. By 2006, those two projects and others were embarrassing the customers: slow performance, wrong prices, orders and prices that failed to sync, and product descriptions all scrambled together. The partners were happy to give us the re-work project.
There are five failure points in the ERP-eCommerce relationship that that have remained consistent over the last twenty years. Let’s explore those risks and then look at the questions customers should ask to help avoid failure.
1. Lack of ownership of the project.
When an eCommerce website requires more than 3 vendors, and add-ons, the site owner may lose track of the goal and the leadership elements required to reach it. For example, a web designer is often dropped in at the end to make it pretty when marketing, who weren’t consulted early on, see what a template website looks like.
Who has ownership of the site from a systems perspective from end to end? If it’s the CEO or someone else who is not engaged in the project, then problems and expectations in the design can be discovered too late. A leader with a total picture will start raising the challenges on day one and keep pressing the various players as the project evolves.
2. ERP not built for eCommerce activity and eCommerce isn’t as disciplined as ERP.
Buyers experience poor outcomes because they can’t sit with a truth about eCommerce: accounting accuracy is at odds with super-fast transactions. Customers experience cryptic errors no one can solve, and slow performance. This is why there are expensive commerce add-ons to work around those issues.
Your day-to-day SaaS ERP experience can vary compared to on prem. Someone on the team needs a holistic understanding of your architecture and how to manage it. Delivering web and mobile experiences requires totally different domain-specific disciplines. It’s important that each specialist has the authority to raise the red flag when it’s needed. When a project goes wrong, everyone kind of knew some critical point had been crossed. Often culture does not reward those who speak up.
3. Check-in calls start off with sports news, but the timeline has slipped again.
If you’re on your second or third “two more weeks” after asking for changes, it means no one really is tracking how complete the tasks are. Especially in a dueling project, the eCommerce is taking a back seat to the ERP.
But when the go live of the website is tied to the go live of the ERP, that’s a train you can’t afford to miss. You have to protect that date. When it’s a multivendor project, part-time resources from those vendors will hop on your project, put in some work, and move on to other projects. Someone has to measure the completeness of those tasks. This makes creating momentum very difficult. If your resources are not full time, I’d ask to see a time log. The PM should check that work as it’s delivered, but if the PM is the ERP PM, they’re primarily worried about the ERP, and the website comes second to the ERP and all its other integrations.
4. Well-meaning partners encourage zero customization, even for $100M+ companies.
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