A confession: I didn't expect the calls to be this consistent
I came into this having spent time in e-commerce and supply chain in previous roles — not on the front lines, but close enough to be aware of the friction that integration challenges create. I thought I knew what to expect on these calls.
I was wrong about one thing. I expected variety. I expected each prospect to have a different story, different systems, different problems. What I found instead was a pattern so consistent it was almost uncanny. Call after call, across businesses of different sizes, different verticals, different tech stacks — the themes were the same. The specific details changed. The underlying frustrations didn't.
That's worth pausing on. If you're an ops manager or IT lead who's been wrestling with integration and feeling like your situation is uniquely broken — it almost certainly isn't. The problems you're dealing with are remarkably common. And that means the solutions are too.
Here's what I kept hearing.
The five things we hear on almost every call
"EDI costs us a fortune and takes forever to set up."
The complaints about EDI were remarkably consistent: eye-watering per-connection fees, long lead times, setup costs that arrived like a shock at the end of a scoping process, and a feeling of being held hostage by providers who knew they were the only game in town. Businesses described committing to a new retail relationship, only to discover that the EDI onboarding alone would take three months and cost more than they'd budgeted for the entire integration. The retail relationship survived. The ops team's sanity didn't always.
"Our marketplace and our ERP don't talk to each other."
This one came up in some form on nearly every call. Orders placed on Shopify, Amazon, or a wholesale portal sitting in one system, stock and fulfilment logic living in an ERP, and someone — usually the same someone — manually bridging the gap between them every day. The automation that was supposed to eliminate this task had either never been implemented, had broken silently, or covered only part of the flow and left the rest to manual intervention. The keying errors that automation was meant to eliminate had simply moved to a different part of the process.
"Our ops team spends half their time on things that should just… happen."
The opportunity cost conversation came up frequently, and it was one of the more uncomfortable ones — not because people didn't understand the problem, but because they did. Talented operations people whose time was being consumed by repetitive manual tasks: checking stock levels, sending pick notes, updating tracking, reconciling orders across systems. The work had to be done. It wasn't generating any competitive advantage. And every hour spent on it was an hour not spent on the things that actually move a business forward.
"We have no visibility into what's actually working."
The visibility problem was one of the more quietly devastating ones. Integrations running — or appearing to run — with no clear signal of when something had gone wrong until a customer complained, a retailer raised a chargeback, or a finance reconciliation produced a number that didn't make sense. The absence of error monitoring and alerting meant that failures were discovered downstream, under pressure, at the worst possible time. Several people described the particular stress of not knowing whether their automation was working until it visibly wasn't.
"We're juggling different requirements for different parties and it's exhausting."
Multi-channel complexity showed up in almost every call. Different retailers with different EDI requirements. Different marketplaces with different data formats. Different 3PLs with different despatch confirmation flows. Each integration was its own project, its own set of requirements, its own maintenance burden. The cumulative weight of managing all of them — while trying to run an actual business — was a persistent source of stress that no single tool had managed to fully address.
The most important insight: some operations should be invisible
Beyond the specific pain points, there was a broader observation from these calls that I keep coming back to. It's something Steve articulated clearly, and I think it's one of the sharpest ways I've heard the integration problem framed.
"The tools that handle generic operational processes should be invisible. If they're not, they've become the problem."
Here's what that means in practice. E-commerce and supply chain businesses involve a vast range of operational processes — inventory visibility, stock allocation, fulfilment routing, carrier integrations, order ingestion, returns logic, warehouse management. These are important tasks. They have to be done without error. But they aren't where competitive advantage lives.
No customer chooses a brand because of how well it manages its pick notes. No retailer relationship is won because of the quality of an ASN. These are table-stakes operational requirements — things every business in the space simply has to do. The competitive advantages are elsewhere: merchandising, branding, content, customer experience, product strategy.
The operational layer should be handled once, properly, and then become invisible — running in the background, reliably, without consuming the attention of people who could be doing something that actually differentiates the business. When it isn't invisible, it's not just inefficient. It's actively crowding out the work that matters most.
What surprised me most about how Steve runs the calls
I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters for anyone considering reaching out. I've sat in on enough sales calls in my career to know what a sales call looks like. These aren't that.
The discovery calls I sat in on were oriented around a single priority: understanding the prospect's actual situation before anything else. Steve consistently gave people space to describe their current setup in full — the systems, the workarounds, the specific frustrations — before discussing whether Supply Lens was or wasn't a good fit to address them.
The atmosphere on those calls was collaborative in a way that I didn't entirely expect. The people we spoke with were open, candid, and — despite dealing with genuinely difficult situations — energetic about finding a way through. There's something about talking to someone who actually wants to solve your problem, rather than sell you something, that tends to produce that kind of conversation.
If you're weighing up whether to get in touch, that's what you should expect. A conversation oriented around your situation, not around closing a deal.
A note to anyone who recognised themselves above
If you read through those five pain points and felt a flicker of recognition — the EDI costs, the manual bridging, the visibility gaps — I genuinely hope this piece is useful, even if you're nowhere near ready to talk to us.
The main thing I want to get across is this: the fact that these problems are so common doesn't mean they're inevitable. The businesses that feel most stuck are often the ones closest to a straightforward fix — but they've been living with the problem so long it's started to feel structural rather than solvable.
It's usually solvable. And the starting point is usually just a conversation about what's actually going on.
Want to talk through your setup?
No pitch, no pressure. A conversation about what you're running, where the friction is, and whether we can help. If we can't, we'll tell you that too.