Your IT team speaks in APIs and microservices. Your sales team speaks in customer relationships and deal flow. Marketing talks content and campaigns. Customer service talks order volume and handle time.

In issue #2 we talked about The Great Divide – the different languages and priorities that make it so hard for teams to communicate during platform selection. IT prioritizes architecture. Sales prioritizes visibility. Customer service prioritizes efficiency. Finance prioritizes reporting.

They’re all right. But that doesn’t mean they can communicate it with each other.

In working with manufacturers and distributors to pick digital platforms over the years, we’ve seen the effect of these ‘team taxes’. The key to platform success is ensuring team-critical priorities are included in the platform (or roadmap).

Every B2B ecommerce platform decision comes with a hidden cost that never appears in the TCO calculation: the daily friction your team experiences trying to actually use the platform.

Most companies calculate licensing fees, implementation costs, integration expenses, and training budget.

Nobody calculates:

• The 4 extra minutes per order because the platform requires 8 screens instead of 3
• The 2 hours per day of IT support because merchandising can’t update products themselves
• CSRs having to check 2 different systems in order to provide customers an order status update

That’s the team tax. And it it can easily compound daily.

Here’s what can easily happen in platform selection.

The selection committee:

• 2 IT people (use platform 0 times/day)
• 1-2 executives (use platform 0 times/day)
• Maybe 1 e-commerce manager (power user but not customer-facing)

The people NOT in the room:

• Customer service reps (power users)
• Inside sales team (use daily)
• Merchandising team (need to make changes daily)
• Operations team (handle exceptions constantly)

The demos show the happy path. The reference calls are with successful implementations. The RFP responses say “yes” to everything.

Nobody asks: “Show me how a customer service rep handles an interrupted order with a pricing override and a backorder substitution.”

To avoid the team tax, your process needs:

• Separate requirement sessions with each team – not one meeting dominated by the group leading the project
• Use case validation with actual team members – not just executives
• Cross-functional participation– to ensure all parties are accounted for

This isn’t just about ecommerce platforms. The same approach works for PIM, marketing automation, CRM, and any other platform where multiple teams need to work together to serve customers.

Sales Team

Critical questions:

• What visibility can sales have?
• How soon can current sales processes be migrated to digital platforms?
• Can customers justifiably rely on pricing and fulfillment accuracy?
• Can they access customer information during calls without jumping systems?

The team tax: Much has been said about ensuring sales is on board. Here’s one of the ways you can ensure they’re a partner not a competitor.

Customer Service / Inside Sales

Your highest-volume users, who interact with customers daily and may often get over-looked in the process.

Critical questions:

• What does customer impersonation look like? And what can/can’t they do that a customer may/not be able to do?
• What abilities do CSRs have to change orders to satisfy customer requests?
• What dashboards exist for CSR management?

The team tax: Every extra 30 seconds per order × 300 orders daily = $50K+ annually in wasted labor, plus longer hold times and frustrated reps.

Marketing / Merchandising

They need to move fast. If they need IT for every change, your platform becomes a bottleneck.

What you need to know:

• Can marketing manage the content deployments necessary without IT involvement?
• If not, can it be easily configured?
• Does the platform support the promotional complexity you need (at Order, Catalog, Category, SKU and Variant levels?
• Can merchandising react to competitor pricing changes in hours, not weeks?

The team tax: Marketing waiting days for IT to update content. Promotions that take 3 days to set up instead of 30 minutes. Missed revenue opportunities.

Operations / Fulfillment

They need order data to flow cleanly to your warehouse and logistics systems. When it doesn’t, they fix it manually.

What you need to know:

• How does order data (fields and conditions) actually flow to your WMS/3PL? (Not the demo – the daily reality)
• What happens when inventory allocation doesn’t match warehouse reality?
• Can the platform handle your special fulfillment scenarios? (Drop ship, will call, customer pickup)

The team tax: Operations manually correcting order data. Inventory sync issues creating backorders that shouldn’t exist. Delays nobody can explain to customers.

IT / Technical Team

Yes, architecture matters. But IT also needs to support the platform daily – not just implement it.

What you need to know:

• What’s the actual ongoing maintenance burden?
• What can business users do themselves vs. what requires IT resources?
• What breaks when the ERP updates?

The team tax: IT spending 10 hours per week on “low maintenance” platform support. Every business user request requiring development work. Integration fragility that breaks with every upstream change.

Finance

They need to close the books, reconcile orders, and trust the numbers. If not, it’s going to be spreadsheets.

What you need to know:

• Can you manage the budgets, balances and order conditions associated with customer accounts and billing?
• Can you get the reports you need without custom development?

The team tax: Extra time managing customer orders, etc. Finance exporting data to Excel because platform reports don’t match accounting needs. Manual processes that should be automated.

Platform capabilities matter. Architecture matters. Integration matters.

But none of it matters if your team can’t actually use the platform to serve customers efficiently.

The companies that avoid the team tax ask the right questions of the right people before signing the contract. They understand that bridging The Great Divide isn’t about getting everyone to agree – it’s about making sure everyone’s needs are documented, prioritized, and validated before the decision is made.

Want some of the questions to ask? Be sure to check out The 57 eCommerce Questions No One Asks (but Should) included as an asset in this issue (see email for download).