What drives your success? That’s obviously a loaded question, and there are no simple answers – especially in a world as complex and rapidly changing as ecommerce. Geoffrey Moore (of Crossing the Chasm fame) suggests that all the activities of a company can be divided into two categories – core and context. Core are those activities which differentiate and drive the business. Context are all those activities that you have to do just to survive.

Over time tasks and efforts that were once core become context. Doing business online was a core activity five or six years ago – it could differentiate your company and provide a strategic advantage. Today, if you have a modern ecommerce platform, sophisticated guided navigation/site search, personalized cross-selling, real-time inventory status for your physical stores with online ordering and local pickup or returns, and high-end website analytics to track your site traffic, campaigns, and visitor behavior you’re doing well but have no advantage what-so-ever over dozens of other retailers. As Moore predicted, core becomes context and the cycle repeats endlessly.

The challenge is that as time passes and your business grows, the percentage of your time and money available to spend on core activities – new initiatives that can drive growth and success – shrinks simply because you still have to keep doing all the existing activities too. For an online retailer or business, it’s easy to be consumed with the ‘day to day’ effort of managing website infrastructure, organic and paid search campaigns, site merchandising and promotions, basic reporting and occasional analysis. But all of these activities and more are simply the baseline these days – the minimum you must do to be competitive and marginally successful.

So what are the core activities in online commerce today? What should you be doing and thinking about to drive differentiation and advantage? What skills and initiatives need to be cultivated now in order to survive in the not-too-distant future?

A few days at the Shop.org conference in Las Vegas have confirmed at least two of them for me. Details in the next post.