Half Your Custom Code Is Not Load-Bearing, but Nobody Will Tell You Which Half#19
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…ll Tell You Which Half
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📝 Blog Post — The Merchant-Side Gap
Hook: Every platform migration forces a conversation most merchants have never had: which of your custom features actually drive revenue, and which are just artifacts of the last platform's limitations?
Angle: When mid-market merchants migrate platforms, they carry a list of custom behaviors they assume are essential. In practice, roughly half of those behaviors exist because the old platform could not do something natively and a workaround was built. The other half genuinely differentiates the business. Telling them apart requires a kind of audit that neither the outgoing agency nor the incoming platform vendor is incentivized to perform honestly. The merchant needs someone in the room whose job is to ask 'does this feature earn its maintenance cost?' and who does not benefit from the answer being yes.
Source material: Baseline Merchant-Side Gap: 'The vanilla SaaS gap pattern' with anchor 'Half the custom code we are migrating is not load-bearing. The other half is. Telling those apart is the project.' Also baseline: estimate compression, KPI-listing validation as silent gate. Delta: merchant-side friction around scope expansion and estimate ownership. Doug's personal notes: SkuNexus business profile showing the complexity of OMS/WMS integration surfaces, and his positioning doc emphasis on the role that does not exist (independent merchant-side advisor).
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