What are the biggest challenges when building an ecommerce platform?

[owenpalmer]

Are the biggest challenges purely technical? Is it tax, security, payment, cost of development, marketing the platform?

If you find this question too ambiguous, just provide your own context. High quality answers are very much appreciated!

[jimkleiber]

I'd guess that it's actually sales/marketing/getting people to show up, at least that's the challenge I often face when building businesses online. As someone who cares a lot about the product, I often overlook the (digital) distribution of said product. Without other people, there is no business.

[JLuterek]

Building a platform or building an ecommerce business? For a platform I would say the number of variations and edge cases from one business to the next. eCommerce looks deceptively simple, some category pages, product pages, cart & checkout, but once you get into the weeds with multiple brands you realize how immense the requirement list is and how flexible the solution needs to be. So it ends up requiring a large team with extensive experience to build something worth purchasing, which means it's a massive expense before signing a first customer. Most run out of funding before becoming profitable.

[ffhhj]

Dealing with a single payment processor that could decide to ban your account and kill the business, there are horror stories about this every week.