I spent about seven years building and running the e-commerce website for a shop selling a widely available consumer product. I also handled the marketing and gave strategic advice along the way.
The site was built deliberately for local SEO. Customers found products on Google, ordered, and collected locally or had them delivered nearby. It was never meant to be a national e-commerce operation, because competing nationally in that market was a fight we could not win. The big retailers have bigger budgets, bigger ranges and better prices. Fighting them head-on is madness.
There was something else going on under the surface too. The previous owner also owned another business that bought large amounts of product from the shop. That one account was quietly inflating the turnover and the profitability. On paper the shop looked stronger than it really was.
When the business sold, the new owner missed both points. He did not see that the advantage was local, and he did not see that a chunk of the revenue came from one related account that was about to disappear. Despite my attempts to advise otherwise, he set out to compete nationally against the giants.
The business failed. Not because of the market, and not because of effort. It failed because the strategy ignored what actually made the business work.
Two lessons from this one.
First: if you do not understand what your advantage is, you cannot use it. His advantage was locality. The right move was to market the shop harder locally, not to burn cash fighting national players.
Second: one account making up a large slice of revenue is a massive red flag. I have written about client concentration before, and this was a textbook case. Scrutinise the numbers before you buy, and ask where the money actually comes from.
Ask questions. Respect experience. And know what you are actually good at before you bet the business on being something else.