Commerce Infrastructure Checklist for SMB and Startup Growth

So, you’re ready to take your business to the next level? That’s fantastic! You’ve got big plans - you are doubling down on your marketing and sales efforts with a strategy to expand your reach, launch new products and services, accept payments online, and a mission to keep customers happy.

Today, with all the hype around AI and its promise to take care of the mundane, it might seem like building a robust commerce system to support your growth should be straightforward.

But reality paints a different picture.

The siloed nature of revenue processes

Businesses are traditionally organised into separate departments, each with its own head and individual goals, tools, and priorities. This departmental structure, while mostly effective, can create friction points and lost sales opportunities due to disparate systems and lack of alignment.

For instance, sales operations typically report to the Head of Sales, finance to the Head of Finance, while marketing operations report to the Head of Marketing, and Customer Success to their respective head. And, for the most part, it works. But the challenge with this way of working is that it creates silos and misalignment, which leads to revenue leakage, data silos, and lack of actionable insights.

The DIY SaaS dilemma

Additionally, many “heads of” in small businesses, startups, and scaleups are enticed by the DIY promise with SaaS platforms that power key workflows within their functions.

A few clicks, a custom website here, an analytics tool there, a CRM here, and a subscription model there, and suddenly, you’re up and running—or so it seems.

The idea of total control and upfront savings sounds incredibly appealing. However, as many founders have painfully discovered, the hidden costs of a DIY commerce stack quickly adds up.

Imagine this: you set up your online presence and implement a basic subscription model. You have a form that captures leads. You have a high-touch well designed sales process.

Everything appears to be running smoothly and the revenue starts rolling in. Then come the challenges: tracking won deals, tracking when you get paid, multi-currency conversions, attributing revenue correctly across various marketing and sales channels, and reconciling transactions to ensure your accounting system matches your payment provider’s data.

And,

Your accountant doesn’t have access to your CRM, and/or unable to extract the data they need to reconcile payment transactions.

Your sales teams don’t know when the invoices go out and when they get paid. They go into sales conversations blind.

Your marketing qualified leads are passed to sales in a spreadsheet.

This is when you hit a brick wall.

Suddenly, you’re facing the need to bolt on additional functionality that should have been considered from the start.

Worse still, the sales guru you hired to bolster your sales pipeline suggests that you need to add a junior “warrior” and “spreadsheet whisperer” to crunch data and compile monthly revenue reports. Before you know it, you’re burning through budgets with unnecessary salaries, wasting precious time, and missing out on significant growth opportunities.

The core issue here is clear: a fragmented and uncoordinated end-to-end process operationalised on multiple tools and systems that creates more problems than it solves.

The global SaaS market is projected to reach US$793.10bn by 2029.

There are 100s of well known prominent tools out there that do quite well within the function of your revenue generation processes, but they are not integrated.

Each functional leader advocates their own technology (and budgets!). Data is siloed and disconnected. Handovers are manual and error prone.

What is Commerce Infrastructure?

A commerce infrastructure powers processes that encompasses the entire customer journey—from the moment a product or service is defined to long after the sale is completed.

Imagine your business as a finely tuned engine.

Every process within all departments — from defining a product, to marketing, sales, fulfillment, reconciliation, and engagement—needs to work in harmony to drive growth.

When one part lags or operates in isolation, the entire engine suffers. Disjointed systems, outdated data, and manual processes create friction, slow growth, and ultimately result in lost revenue.

Online payments are just one part of the revenue lifecycle

There is a myth about e-commerce that needs clearing up. Commerce (even the online version of it with an ‘e’) is not just about processing payments — it’s about orchestrating every step of the revenue lifecycle in a seamless and integrated manner. From acquisition to operation, fulfillment, and advocacy.

Commerce infrastructure enables RevOps

A commerce infrastructure delivers an integrated revenue system where every component communicates effectively, enabling you to focus on strategic initiatives rather than firefighting operational inefficiencies.

In other words, commerce infrastructure refers to the tech and data infrastructure that powers “Revenue Operations (RevOps)” - a business function emerging in medium to large organisations that aligns all revenue-related activities under one umbrella.

Rather than let marketing, sales, customer success, product, and finance operate on separate islands, RevOps brings them together with shared goals, unified data, and streamlined processes.

Challenges small to medium businesses face from misalignment & disconnected systems

Misalignment isn’t just a big-company problem. It can be even more acute for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and growing startups.

With limited resources, SMB teams often adopt a “DIY” approach to their tech stack – piecing together various SaaS tools for product, engineering, marketing, sales, e-commerce, billing, support, etc.

This patchwork can create serious business challenges:

1. Revenue Leakage

One major consequence of siloed teams and systems is revenue leakage – money that your business should have earned but never actually sees due to process gaps or errors​. This can happen in many ways: a lead that showed interest on your website never makes it into the sales pipeline, a customer who was ready to renew churns because account management dropped the ball, or an upsell opportunity was lost because sales didn’t know the customer was interested in a solution or had a problem that your service could solve.

A study by HubSpot found that misaligned sales and marketing teams can reduce revenue by 10% or more per year for B2B companies​.

One clear symptom of revenue leakage is duplicate or redundant work. Perhaps your sales team manually enters an order into the CRM, then your finance team manually re-enters the same order into the accounting system (e.g., Xero). Not only is this double effort, but it opens the door for mistakes (typos, missing line items) that cause billing errors or lost billables.

SMBs can’t afford revenue left on the table due to internal gaps. Every dollar matters, so plugging these leaks with aligned RevOps processes and integrated systems should be your priority.

A new study from independent market research firm Vanson Bourne and Fivetran reveal that poor data quality alone (often a byproduct of disjointed systems) impacted organisations global annual revenue by 6%, or US$406 million on average.

2. Data silos

SMBs often take a “best of breed” approach to software: a separate app for CRM, a separate one for sales outreach, one for invoicing and accounting, another for online payments and subscriptions, and a different one for operations and support tickets. Individually, each tool is great – but together, they may not form a cohesive whole. Data ends up siloed in each application​.

Your contacts and email stats are sitting in one platform.

Sales has deal information in spreadsheets.

Ecommerce payments and orders sit in another system.

Finance sends invoices and tracks operational expenses in another set of accounting tools.

Because these DIY solutions aren’t fully integrated, it’s difficult (or impossible) to get a single source of truth for customer data or business performance.

Data silos hurt decision-making and execution. Teams lack visibility into each other’s information – the marketing team may not know which leads converted to customers or what revenue came from a campaign, because that info lives in the sales and finance systems. Likewise, the sales team might not know that a particular customer they’re calling has an open support ticket causing frustration, so they walk into a conversation blind.

Zendesk’s 2023 trends report, only 22% of business leaders are confident their teams share data effectively across the organisation​. This means nearly 4 out of 5 companies feel their data is trapped in silos.

For small businesses, this issue is compounded by the fact that owners and team members wear multiple hats. Nearly half of SMB owners report taking on five or more roles within their business – CEO, salesperson, customer service rep, HR, you name it. They simply don’t have the bandwidth to manually pull reports from five different systems and piece them together to get insights. Executing on these ideas is another challenge.

3. Lack of access to insights

Even when SMBs gather lots of data, they often struggle with data quality and accessibility. Poor data quality can mean duplicate records (the same customer listed twice under slightly different names), outdated information (an email address that’s no longer valid), or inconsistent data entry (one system uses “Australia” while another uses “AU” – making it hard to merge datasets).

These issues are a natural byproduct of manual processes and multiple disconnected systems. Without dedicated data management resources (which most SMBs don’t have), data becomes messy. And poor data leads to poor decisions.

For smaller businesses, the cost might not be measured in millions, but it shows up in other ways: marketing campaigns underperform because of “dirty” email lists, sales efforts are duplicated because leads are assigned to two reps accidentally, or reporting is inaccurate, leading you to invest in the wrong area. Additionally, when data is scattered, getting to the data is hard. An SMB might not have a BI tool or analyst to compile reports. If it takes you hours to manually compile monthly sales results (pulling numbers from Excel, your CRM, and your billing software), you likely won’t do it as often as you should.

In fact, 40% of small businesses in a Xero survey said they fail to see the relevance of new technologies for their company​, and a similar number don’t believe tech would deliver value for money.

Lessons from the trenches

Many of the above challenges boil down to one root cause: not having a robust technical infrastructure that underpins the entire customer journey.

Over the years, I’ve seen firsthand how poorly planned processes and DIY systems across product, sales, finance, marketing, and operations can become a competitive handicap. I’ve witnessed teams struggling with siloed data, manual reconciliations, and misaligned strategies, all of which drain time, energy, and resources.

Working with startups, scaleups, and small businesses has taught me that the secret to sustainable growth isn’t in adding more tools—it’s quite the opposite and it starts with integrating them effectively.

These experiences have cemented my belief that a robust, integrated commerce infrastructure isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity for any business serious about scaling sustainably.

With the rise of GenAI and Agentic era - the days of cobbling together disparate systems are over. What’s needed now is a strategic approach that unifies every step of the revenue lifecycle, so you can put it on autopilot.

Why a Unified Commerce Infrastructure Matters

So, to fix the misalignment and fragmentation we discussed, companies are increasingly turning to unified commerce infrastructure. But what exactly does that mean?

At its core, unified commerce is a strategy (which includes an integrated technology stack) that integrates all your customer-facing channels and back-end systems into one cohesive platform​.

It’s the evolution of omnichannel. Where omnichannel focuses on offering multiple sales channels to customers, unified commerce goes a step further by connecting those channels and the data/processes behind them on a single platform​.

In practical terms, unified commerce infrastructure might look like this for an SMB: using a platform (or an integrated suite of tools) that can handle e-commerce, point-of-sale, inventory management, payment processing, CRM, and even proposals and billing in one. The key is to have a single source of truth for data and processes and the ability to leverage real-time data to drive insights, make decisions, automate workflows, implement AI, and scale.

For instance, HookedGrowth’s approach to commerce infrastructure leverages best-in-class tools – Stripe for payments, HubSpot for CRM, PandaDoc for document workflow, and Xero for accounting – integrated into one engine​.

The benefits:

1. Consumers expect unified experiences: Harvard Business Review noted that 73% of consumers use multiple channels in their shopping journey (as mentioned)​, and Google found 61% of consumers start shopping on one device and finish on another​, Customers don’t think in silos – they assume your online and offline and other channels are one. Falling short of this expectation can cost you business.
2. Unlock more revenue: Both Xero and Deloitte studies found that an estimated of £77 billion revenue opportunity if small businesses digitalized more fully​ and that highly digitally-engaged SMBs were 3 times more likely to be creating jobs and even 6 times more likely to be experiencing high employee growth rates compared to basic digital adopters​.
3. Unlock all-in-one efficiency: PandaDoc’s research into small businesses transitioning to digital workflows revealed that 64% of SMB owners felt they could save up to $5,000 a year by automating document processes, and 31% said saving time and boosting efficiency were the greatest benefits of going digital​.

In summary, a unified commerce infrastructure addresses the very challenges I outlined previously in this article: it closes the leaks by ensuring no customer or transaction falls through the cracks, it breaks down data silos by centralising information, it vastly improves data quality and accessibility by having one system capture everything at the source, and it provides that robust end-to-end platform that can power your entire customer journey from awareness to purchase to repeat business.

Your checklist to get started with RevOps and a unified commerce platform

By now, I hope it is clear that RevOps (alignment of people and processes) and unified commerce infrastructure (alignment of technology and data) are complementary. RevOps provides the strategic framework and cross-functional mindset, while a unified platform with integrated tools provides the tools and data backbone. Together, they form a powerful combination to drive growth.

Here is an actionable checklist:

1. Establish a cross-functional collaboration

Start by getting all revenue-related stakeholders to the table – marketing, sales, customer success, product, finance/operations. RevOps often begins with conversations and mapping of the customer journey across these teams. Document where handoffs happen, where data is exchanged, and where breakdowns occur. This exercise not only identifies friction points (e.g., leads not followed up, or customers confused by inconsistent info), but also builds shared understanding.

2. Audit and consolidate your tech stack

It’s hard to unify if you’re juggling 20 different software tools. Conduct an audit of all systems and tools used across your revenue process. Identify redundancies and critical gaps. Often, you’ll find multiple tools doing overlapping jobs (like three different analytics tools, or two databases of customer contacts). Decide which ones to keep as part of the “unified” stack and which to phase out. This doesn’t always mean one single software for everything (though in some cases it might). It could mean choosing a primary CRM and ensuring other tools integrate into it, or adopting a platform like Shopify or Stripe that offers plugins to cover adjacent needs.

3. Implement a single source of truth for data

This step is closely related to tech consolidation, but it’s more about data management practice. Decide where your “source of truth” for key data will live. For example, customer contact information might live in the CRM as the master (with other systems pushing updates there or pulling from it), product inventory might live in your commerce platform, financial data in the accounting system, etc., but they all sync. Consider using data validation rules and automation, for instance, if a deal closes in your CRM, automatically trigger the creation of a customer record and invoice in accounting, so nothing is missed or mis-entered. This not only saves time but also keeps data consistent across systems.

4. Automate at least 2 end-to-end workflows

Identify the key workflows that span multiple departments and automate them through your unified infrastructure. For example: the lead-to-opportunity workflow (marketing to sales), the quote-to-cash workflow (sales to finance), the order-fulfillment-delivery workflow, and the customer issue resolution workflow (support to success). With a unified system, you can often implement trigger-based actions. If a lead fills a form on your site (marketing system), automatically create a lead in CRM and notify sales. If sales marks a deal as won in the CRM, automatically generate the contract in PandaDoc and upon signing, auto-create the invoice in Xero and a welcome email via marketing automation. This kind of straight-through processing was once only in reach of big enterprises with big pockets, but today SMB-friendly tools can do it with clicks not code.

5. Then, monitor, iterate, and optimise.

Aligning RevOps with commerce infrastructure is not a one-and-done project; it’s an ongoing discipline. Once you have systems and processes in place, establish metrics to monitor their effectiveness. RevOps should track things like: lead response times (did they drop now that marketing and sales are aligned on a tool?), sales cycle length, conversion rates at each stage, customer churn rates, and revenue leakage points (hopefully now sealed). With your new unified data, you might discover insights like “one SMB segment churns at a higher rate than another SMB segment or mid-market” or “customers who engage on 3+ channels have 2x lifetime value.” Use these insights to continuously refine your approach – perhaps tailoring campaigns differently, or adding a new product line, or a new feature to the customer portal, etc.

The path forward

If you have read so far, chances are you recognise the challenges in your own business – perhaps you’ve experienced the pain of a deal falling through the cracks or the frustration of not trusting your reports. The good news is you don’t have to tackle it alone. There are battle-tested frameworks and tools to help you implement RevOps strategies and commerce infrastructure effectively.

If you’re serious about scaling your online business, it’s time to move beyond the DIY approach. A fragmented commerce infrastructure isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a growth barrier that can drain resources, frustrate business owners, and erode customer trust. With the right framework, you can transform your operations into a unified, efficient engine that drives sustainable growth.

At HookedGrowth, I bring years of hands-on experience and a deep understanding of commerce systems to help you build a revenue engine that works for you. By unifying every step of the revenue lifecycle—from defining your value proposition to engaging customers long after the sale—I help you establish a commerce infrastructure that’s not only efficient but also scalable and future-proof.