the maturity model for modern commerce

Detailing the path to digital excellence

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Get the most out of the Maturity Model by sharing it with your team, self assessing where you’re at, and then discussing and solidifying opportunities to move across the model towards digital excellence.


Our downloadable slide deck has everything you need to put this into practice at your next ecommerce team meeting, including a guide for utilizing the model and industry averages to see how your maturity stacks up against your peers.

Netrush’s Maturity Model for Modern Commerce is a powerful tool for Brandrunners eager to uplevel their digital business.

The Brandrunner’s Maturity Model™ provides a framework for assessing the current state, setting achievable team goals, and a step-by-step guide for getting there.

Encompassing eight essential elements (or “modules”) of a modern commerce business—like strategy, content, advertising, and supply chain—weaving this model into your team meetings and strategic planning process will keep you on track in building a well-rounded, holistic, and customer-centric ecommerce business that can serve as a competitive advantage for years to come.

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Maturity Model Brand and Consumer POV

The eight modules of the Maturity Model can be thought of as the components standing between a brand and its consumers. “Brand Point of View” at the top of the model outlines the brand’s digital maturity, spanning from having no control of its digital presence up to true digital excellence. At the bottom, “Consumer Point of View” describes the ultimate effect of a given maturity level within a given module—how that brand is showing up in the eyes of the consumer. For example, with no control over its digital presence (Stage 0), a brand is virtually invisible to the consumer. In contrast, if a brand is actively using ecommerce to build the brand (Stage 3), the consumer can see—either consciously or subconsciously—that the brand is seeking loyalty, via things like cross- and upselling content and fulfillment and post-purchase experiences that are carefully crafted for the online shopper.

The lower the maturity, the more these components serve as roadblocks or speed bumps between brands and their consumers. Confusing content, low visibility on the search engine results page (SERP), and poor fulfillment experiences don’t make it easy for shoppers to buy from you or become brand loyalists. On the flip side, the higher the maturity, the more the components serve as a fast track to consumers and customer loyalty—think crystal clear and compelling content, high visibility to the consumer, fast and transparent delivery with customer-friendly packaging.

  • Across most of the Maturity Model modules, Stage 0 can be characterized as ignoring the ecommerce channel within your business—the opportunity that comes with it, what’s at stake without it, and the current impact of ecommerce on your brand, with or without you actively selling digitally.

    Stage 1 brands are in the process of developing their digital strategy and largely “working with what they got” when it comes to managing the channel. That often looks like 1-2 sales individuals taking on the Amazon business on the side, leveraging existing content assets from other parts of the organization, and investing a small amount into low funnel pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

    Moving from Stage 1 to Stage 2 often requires moving beyond “working with what we got” and investing in incremental resources and capabilities that are unique to ecommerce. This work can’t be done without an identified ecommerce leader, what we call a Brandrunner™.

    Brandrunners are the individuals leading this ecommerce pursuit and therefore leading their organizations into the future. Common qualities we’ve observed in successful Brandrunners are:

    • Bold and fearless leadership to move beyond the traditional model, test and learn, and effectively pull the broader organization together and into the future of modern commerce

    • Multidisciplinary doers as they need to get their hands dirty with all of the modules you see in this model, from content to advertising to supply chain, and more

    • Data-driven decision makers, using performance-based systems to invest wisely.

    • Customer-centric mentality as marketplaces and direct-to-consumer (DTC) bring brands closer than ever to their end consumer

    Once you have your Brandrunner, the organization then has the dedicated capacity to identify the most critical gaps in your ecommerce strategy and capabilities, and address those accordingly.

    Some of the biggest upleveling opportunities we commonly see here are with marketplace management—moving from simply defending your brand against rogue sellers and pricing violations to actively elevating your brand presence on the marketplace through levers like brand store pages and thoughtful ecommerce product launches, advertising—expanding spend and strategies to reach incremental, interested customers rather than solely ready-to-convert customers, and data—establishing the skills, practices, and tech stack needed to turn your ecommerce data into actionable insights (and actually put the insight to use!).

  • We’ve found Stage 2 to be the most common current state for brands. In working with these brands, we’ve also found the transition from Stage 2 to Stage 3 to be quite challenging compared to the earlier Stages with lower hanging fruit to uplevel maturity.

    Here are a couple helpful perspectives if you find yourself feeling “stuck” in Stage 2 across a few modules:

    • The chasm between Stage 2 and Stage 3 is often the separator between brands with a sound and solid ecommerce business, and brands that are truly stepping into digital leadership. Think of other brands in your peer group or network that have commanding positions in the digital marketplace—they often have larger teams and budgets, and more robust capabilities and partnerships. In other words, they’ve likely made their ecommerce “share of investment proportional to opportunity”, as in Stage 3 of the Strategy module. So in many cases, it starts there with the strategy and a committed decision around how important the channel is to your brand-building efforts.

    • Shifting to customer-centric thinking is another cornerstone to achieving Stage 3 maturity, moving from a consumer point of view that is “this brand is conversant with me” to “this brand is seeking my loyalty”. This can be challenging for large consumer brands that are built for wholesale and have spent decades treating retailers as their “customers”. Here, we’re talking about the end customer, i.e. the real consumer buying your product. Use the model to brainstorm ways to bring the customer more frequently and deeply into your strategies and tactics, such as unifying your organization around the consumer, using content to drive customer loyalty and lifetime value, proactively testing to gather valuable data about your customer, and using your supply chain to delight the customer in every way.

  • Based on our experience working with and benchmarking many brands, Stage 4 tends to be aspirational for most brands, helping to provide a clear vision for what best-in-class looks like.

    If you’re already there—whether it’s for just a couple modules or all of them—great work! Know that you’re among a small group of digital leaders that likely made bold, early moves before the broader industry. Continue to lean in here to maintain this competitive advantage. As we all know, the ecommerce space moves rapidly and therefore digital excellence is never “done”—stay on top of the trends and your customer’s needs, evolving digital strategies and investing accordingly in order to stay ahead of the curve.