Deciding where to invest in global ecommerce

The need

Decide where ecommerce growth justified investment

The company was selling through distribution partners, e-procurement platforms, pure-play sites, marketplaces and direct channels across multiple regions.

The opportunity was substantial, but difficult to compare. Leadership needed to understand where the company had a meaningful ecommerce opportunity and how its competitive position varied by market and route to market.

The starting point

Substantial internal knowledge, but no consistent view of the opportunity around it

The organization already held significant knowledge about its existing position, routes to customers and regional markets.

That information was spread across the business and reflected what the company could see from inside. It did not provide a consistent external view of market opportunity that allowed different regions and channels to be compared on the same basis.

What we did

Built a common view of market opportunity, competitive position and where investment made sense

We structured and brought together the company's existing knowledge, then built an external view of ecommerce opportunity across its major routes to market.

TAM, SAM and SOM were sized by channel and region, giving the company a more precise basis for comparing opportunities than topline market size alone.

We then benchmarked the company's maturity against competitors and used SWOT analysis to identify where its position was stronger, where it was vulnerable and where opportunities existed.

Finally, we brought the market sizing, competitive analysis and internal knowledge into a tailored investment framework. This created a consistent basis for distinguishing where the company should expand, where maintaining its existing position made more sense and where resources could be reduced or redirected.

What they got

A five-year roadmap connecting market evidence to investment priorities

The analysis was translated into a five-year ecommerce roadmap built around expand, hold and exit decisions across regions and routes to market.

Rather than leaving each market to make its case using different assumptions, the roadmap gave global and regional teams a common evidence base for pressure-testing priorities, supporting investment cases and considering where resources should be concentrated.

Why it mattered

Leadership could compare ecommerce opportunities as investment decisions rather than simply as market-size estimates

The company now had a way to weigh the scale of an opportunity alongside its own position and the competitive realities of pursuing it.

That gave leadership and regional teams evidence for deciding where ecommerce growth justified further investment, where the existing position should be maintained and where attention and resources could be directed elsewhere.