Why eCommerce Won’t Win on Best Practices Alone with Rob Hoekman
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Why eCommerce Won’t Win on Best Practices Alone with Rob Hoekman
eCommerce has reached a point where many digital experiences look and function the same. According to Rob Hoekman, Senior Director of Experience Consulting at Empathy Lab by EPAM, years of optimization and adherence to best practices have created consistency—but at the cost of meaningful differentiation.
In this episode of The FODcast, Rob examines how the eCommerce landscape has evolved and why traditional approaches are delivering diminishing returns. As platforms, design patterns and capabilities converge, brands are finding it increasingly difficult to stand out or unlock new growth through incremental improvements alone.
The conversation explores how eCommerce functionality has become widely accessible, reducing competitive advantage; why replatforming no longer guarantees transformative gains; and how extensive customization and legacy systems can create operational complexity and risk. Together, these factors are prompting many organizations to rethink not just their technology stack, but the broader structure and strategy of their commerce ecosystems.
Rob offers a pragmatic perspective on what comes next. Rather than relying on new tools or platforms to solve strategic challenges, he emphasizes the importance of reexamining how commerce systems are designed, integrated and managed. Sustainable growth, he argues, will come from intentional ecosystem design—not simply adopting the latest best practice.
Read the full interview here.
Learn more about Empathy lab by visiting www.empathylab.com/
