Ecommerce Growth and Marketplace Expansion at Big Box Outlet Store

The problem

Big Box Outlet Store sells liquidation, closeout, and surplus inventory — the opposite of a stable catalogue with predictable reorders. Product mix turns over constantly, quantities are often one-off or limited, and merchandising has to move fast enough to sell through inventory before it stops being relevant. Ecommerce for a business like this isn't just "put products online" — it's building a channel and a set of workflows that can absorb constant change without falling apart.

What I did

Platform management. Owned the Shopify storefront end to end — merchandising, site structure, and the day-to-day decisions that keep a fast-changing catalogue usable for customers instead of overwhelming.

Paid advertising. Ran Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns, tuning spend and targeting against a catalogue that doesn't behave like a normal retailer's — creative and targeting had to keep pace with inventory that could sell out or change entirely within days.

Marketplace expansion. Extended the sales channel beyond the core storefront into additional marketplaces, adapting listings and operations to each platform's rules and audience.

Auctions. Built out auction-based selling as a channel for surplus and closeout inventory suited to that format — a different operating model from standard fixed-price ecommerce, run alongside it.

Internal tools and workflow. Where off-the-shelf tools didn't fit how the business actually operated, built internal tooling to close the gap — the same instinct that later became a core part of my ecommerce systems and automation work.

Team leadership. Led the ecommerce function as it grew, balancing platform work, campaign management, and day-to-day merchandising operations.

Business impact

This role is where I learned ecommerce as an operation, not just a technical system — merchandising decisions, ad spend, marketplace rules, and fulfillment realities all interact, and the technical systems only matter if they hold up against that operational messiness. That perspective now shapes how I build software for ecommerce businesses: I design for the actual chaos of retail operations, not an idealized version of it.

What I learned

The biggest lesson from running ecommerce operations directly, rather than building systems for someone else's operation, is that the hardest problems are rarely purely technical. A perfectly engineered sync job doesn't help if the merchandising process feeding it is inconsistent. That's the lens I bring to the systems work described in my other case studies — I build for how the business actually runs, not just for the API spec.