We signed a mid-sized merchant with dozens of locations and complicated fulfillment rules. Their team wasn’t ready, but we wanted them up and running in two weeks. So instead of waiting for them to configure their own system, we built a feature to do it for them.
The feature already existed in Shopify. They could have done it themselves, but that would have taken a month. We didn’t want to wait.
They launched. It broke. We spent longer fixing it than we would have spent waiting. And now we maintain that feature forever, for one merchant.
We made the same mistake with another customer. Their delivery volume didn’t fit our system. We have limits on how we batch routes, and they needed something different. Instead of explaining how we work, we said yes.
Now our ops team manually builds their routes every single day. The customer has no idea because we never explained our process. We skipped straight to “we’ll handle it.” If we pushed back now, they’d be confused. We trained them to expect us to do the work.
This is what happens when we rush to close. We build things that already exist. We say yes to things that aren’t our job. The merchant goes live, but they never really own it. We do.
Every shortcut we took to close faster became work we owned forever.
The fix is patience. Wait for their team. Explain the process. Train them properly. If it takes six weeks instead of two, it takes six weeks. But when they go live, they stay live.