The Operators' Checklist for High-Converting E‑Commerce Systems

1. Payment optionality is non-negotiable

Modern buyers expect more than a single card form. Your stack should balance global rails (PayPal Business or Stripe) with regional rails such as M-Pesa so you can settle in local currencies without hacks.

2. Webhooks need observability

Webhooks are mission control for receipts, shipping, and fulfillment. We require signed payloads, retries, and a visible dead-letter queue so ops teams can self-heal failures instead of pinging engineering.

3. Post-purchase comms close the loop

Automated receipts, shipping timelines, and tracking portals cut support requests by up to 63%. The best systems ship with these templates and let you toggle SMS/WhatsApp fallbacks per market.

4. Dashboards must reflect the P&L

Ops leaders don’t want vanity charts—they want contribution margin per category, refund velocity, and SLA breaches. Align dashboards to financial metrics and you’ll win every QBR.