The broken incentive in eCommerce services.

It took me nearly 18 years working in commerce implementations to see this clearly. Our industry has a broken incentive. And I say that as someone who was part of it.

How the incentive works

The incentive works because most eCommerce service providers are paid for billable hours rather than outcomes, so work naturally expands to justify larger engagements, extra strategy phases, added roles, and documentation that does not change the result, rather than being scoped tightly to what the client actually needs.

For most eCommerce service providers, the primary business objective has quietly become maximizing billable hours. Not deliberately. Not maliciously. But structurally, because that is what the commercial model rewards.

When hours are the metric, something subtle but significant happens to how work gets shaped. Projects stop being optimized for outcomes. They start being optimized for effort.

Extra activities appear, not because they clearly serve the client, but because they justify larger engagements: more strategy phases, more research, more documentation that nobody ends up reading, more roles layered into the engagement that add coordination without adding clarity.

The people doing this work are, by and large, good people. They believe the work is valuable. Many of them are genuinely talented. But when hours matter more than impact, priorities shift. Slowly. Almost invisibly. And behaviors follow.

When hours are the metric, projects stop being optimized for outcomes. They start being optimized for effort.

The result is familiar to anyone who has been on the client side of a large commerce implementation.

• Months of strategy work that produces impressive documentation and minimal business change.
• Roles that seem essential during the engagement and whose absence would not have mattered.
• Scope that grew throughout the project for reasons that were always justifiable but never quite traceable to an outcome.

And at the end of it, an amount of effort spent that was significantly larger than what it would have taken to achieve the same result with a different approach.

The conversations we have become accustomed to

What concerns me most is not that this pattern exists. It is that it has been normalized. Clients have come to expect it. Service providers defend it. The phrase that usually appears at some point is: that is just how these projects go. It has become the cost of admission. A tax that complex organizations pay when they engage with the services industry.

And because both sides have internalized it, it rarely gets named explicitly. Clients budget for more than they think they should need. Service providers build proposals that assume a certain amount of expansion. Everyone proceeds with a tacit understanding of how this is going to go.

I have been in enough steering committee meetings to know that the frustration on the client side is often significant. But it is expressed in hallway conversations after the meeting, not in the meeting itself. Because there is a relationship to protect. A partner who needs to remain engaged. A project that cannot afford disruption. That silence is expensive.

Clients have come to budget for it. Service providers build around it. That is just how these projects go.

We were part of it too

I want to be specific about this because I think it is the part that matters most. We followed the industry norm for a long time. We built the strategy phases. We staffed the engagement the way the industry said engagements should be staffed. We built extensive documentation because that was what best practice looked like. And we did not realize, for a while, that we were optimizing for the wrong things.

The recognition came gradually. We started asking ourselves, at the end of engagements, a different kind of question. Not: did the client accept the deliverables? Not: did we hit the launch date? But: what actually changed the business outcome? The answers were uncomfortable. The work that changed outcomes was almost always a small fraction of the total work. The rest was necessary in some organizational sense, but it was not what moved the needle. And in many cases, it was adding coordination costs that made the work that actually mattered harder to do.

That recognition changed how we built our team, how we scope engagements, and how we think about the work. We removed roles that were adding coordination without adding clarity. We started asking, at the start of every engagement, what actually needs to change and why each activity matters for getting there. We built a system that makes progress and investment visible in real time. I will not pretend we have it perfectly figured out. We are still working on it. But we know what direction we are moving in.

Why this does not get said more often

This does not get said more often because naming it is commercially uncomfortable (it questions the billable-hours model itself), relationally risky in a small industry where naming the pattern can look like calling out specific partners, and genuinely hard to see from inside a system where everyone operates the same way.

Part of the answer is commercial. If your revenue model depends on billable hours, naming this problem is uncomfortable. You are questioning the model that sustains your business.

Part of the answer is relational. The eCommerce services industry is relatively small. People know each other. Naming a systemic problem risks being seen as calling out specific partners or competitors.

And part of the answer is that the problem is genuinely hard to see from inside the system. When everyone around you is doing it the same way, it looks like reality rather than a choice.

I think all of those are real. And I think none of them are good enough reasons to stay quiet about something that has real costs for the organizations on the other side of the relationship.

What the alternative looks like

The alternative is an engagement model aligned with outcomes rather than hours or fixed scope: being explicit from the start about what needs to change, scoping work to what actually affects that outcome, and being willing to tell a client they do not need something even when they would pay for it. This is the architecture-first approach we structure our engagements around.

The alternative to a billable-hours model is not a fixed-price model. That is a different kind of perverse incentive, one that rewards moving fast at the expense of quality and thoroughness.

The alternative is an engagement model aligned with outcomes. That means being explicit, from the beginning of an engagement, about what is trying to change and how you will know if it does.

It means scoping work to what actually affects the outcome rather than to what industry convention says a project of this type should include.

It means being willing to tell a client that they do not need something, even when they are willing to pay for it.

It means asking, throughout an engagement, the uncomfortable question: is what we are doing right now connected to an outcome the client cares about?

The alternative is an engagement model aligned with outcomes. That means being explicit about what is trying to change and how you will know if it does.

That question rules out a surprising amount of what typically gets included in large complex commerce engagements.

It also means accepting that some engagements will be smaller than they would have been under the old model. That is not a cost-free decision in the short term. But it is the right trade, and the commercial case for it compounds over time.

A client who achieves a clear outcome with less effort than expected trusts you with more, stays longer, and refers others. A client who spends significantly and cannot trace it to an outcome will eventually stop, and will tell people why.

The relationships that are built on the alternative model tend to be deeper, more durable, and ultimately more valuable than the ones built on volume. The commercial case is sound. But it requires a different kind of discipline, because the temptation to add scope, add roles, and extend timelines is always present. The incentive to do so has to be actively managed.

What clients can do with this

Clients can protect themselves by asking three questions of any engagement: what outcome does this phase of work connect to, what prompted any growth in scope, and what does on track actually mean in terms of budget and timeline versus what was planned. These questions surface misalignment early, before it compounds.

This is not primarily a piece about what clients should be asking their service partners. But since you are reading it, a few things are worth paying attention to.

When a partner proposes a phase of work, ask what outcome it connects to. Not what deliverable it produces. What outcome. What will be different because of this work that would not have been different without it?

When the engagement grows in scope, ask what prompted it. Was it a new business need that emerged? Or was it something that could have been anticipated at the start but was not scoped in? There is a meaningful difference.

When a status report says you are on track, ask what on track means. What does the budget look like relative to what was planned? What does the timeline look like relative to what was committed? Those two questions often produce different answers than the official status.

None of this requires an adversarial posture. The best service relationships are genuinely collaborative. But the collaboration works better when both sides are aligned on what success actually means.

A genuine question

I do not see many people in this industry talk about this openly. I am not certain whether that is because they do not see it, because they see it and have decided the commercial risk of naming it outweighs the benefit, or because they see it and believe it is a real problem but do not have a clear enough alternative to point to. I suspect it is some combination of all three.

What I am reasonably confident about is that the clients who have been on the other side of this pattern for long enough know it exists. They may not name it the same way. But they feel it. And when a partner shows up with a different approach, they recognize it immediately. That recognition is worth more than any pitch.

Radu Munteanu

Founder & CEO, Luminos Labs