Why adding more sales channels isn’t always a win

You finally landed that big wholesale account. Or perhaps your Amazon store just had its best month ever. On your revenue dashboard, everything looks green. But in the warehouse, the mood is a bit different.

Your team is staying late to manually type orders into your software. Your customer service inbox is full of "Where is my order?" emails because your inventory didn't sync fast enough.

This is the Multichannel Tax. It is the hidden cost of growth that most people don't talk about. For brands making between £5M and £50M, this tax can be high enough to cancel out the profit from your new sales channels.

What do we mean by the human integration problem?

Most brands grow by adding on new apps. You connect Shopify to a marketplace, then add a separate tool for wholesale. Before long, you have a web of systems which only "kind of" talk to each other.

When systems don't talk, humans have to do the work. Your team becomes the "manual middleware." They spend their day:

• Copying and pasting order data between screens.
• Manually checking spreadsheets to see what is actually in stock.
• Firefighting errors when an item sells in two places at once.

The cost of data silos

When your inventory count lives in five different places, none of those places are right. Shopify might think you have ten units, while Amazon shows eight.

This is a cash flow killer. When you don't know what you have, you either buy too much (tying up cash) or too little (losing sales).

How to stop paying the tax

The brands that scale successfully don't just work harder, they change their infrastructure. 

Instead of adding more tools and workarounds, they move to a central Retail Operating System where all operational data lives in one place. Inventory, orders, and stock levels update together, in real time. This removes the need for manual checks, reduces errors, and gives teams a clear view of what is actually happening across every sales channel.

Are you scaling a crisis?

If your team is drowning in manual work today, adding another channel will only make things worse. Every new channel inherits the manual workarounds of the ones before it.

In our latest whitepaper, we explore how growing DTC brands fixed the operational issues that were holding them back. It looks at why adding more sales channels often creates hidden costs, how manual inventory management impacts cash flow, and what changes brands made to support growth without adding more pressure on their teams.

And to help you assess your own situation, we’ve included a nice diagnostic framework. It helps you spot early warning signs, understand where manual work is creeping in, and see whether your current setup can support another sales channel.