eCommerce Project Recovery: Rescuing a 2.5-Year Delayed Implementation From Two Unscrupulous Vendors

Situation: A Strategic eCommerce Platform That Was Never Delivered

A mid-market specialty manufacturing firm had staked its growth strategy on a new eCommerce platform. Annual revenue projections had been built around it. Marketing campaigns had been designed around it. Business units across the company had geared their planning and operations toward the demand and growth the platform was expected to generate. The board had approved the initiative and leadership had committed to outcomes tied to its delivery.

A global eCommerce digital services company was hired to implement the platform. The project was scoped for six months. Two and a half years later, the platform had still not been delivered. Deadlines had come and gone. Promises had been made and broken. The client had incurred nearly $300,000 in losses. The strategic initiatives tied to the platform remained on hold. The CEO was fielding increasing pressure from the board — both on why the project had not been delivered and on the mounting financial impact to the company.

IT had been left holding the accountability for a project it could not control — and its credibility within the organization had suffered badly. Full On Consulting was brought in to determine where the project actually stood, why it was delayed, and what it would take to finally get it delivered.

Challenge: Vendor Malfeasance, Technical Failures, and a CEO Under Board Pressure

The root cause of the delay was a combination of vendor malfeasance and a complete breakdown in project governance. The eCommerce services vendor had significantly underbid the project — by their own accounting, they had lost nearly a million dollars on the engagement. Rather than renegotiate transparently, they had responded to their losses by quietly shifting their project resources to other billable accounts, leaving the client's implementation understaffed and drifting.

The technical situation was equally concerning. When the implementation was eventually reviewed by a new technical partner, it revealed fundamental problems: platform best practices had been ignored, the build-out and extension of the platform had been done incorrectly, the original vendor had overwritten platform patches causing downstream failures, and — most critically — there was no authorization layer on the site. The entire eCommerce platform was effectively unsecured, exposing the client to significant cybersecurity liability. It became clear that the original vendor did not have sufficient technical expertise in the platform they had been hired to implement.

Issues on the client's side also contributed to the delays — incomplete requirements, resource availability gaps, and a CFO who had not been providing full financial transparency to the CEO and board about the true budget impact of the project. Untangling what was vendor-caused and what was client-caused was essential to negotiating a fair resolution and an honest path to delivery.

Action: Assessment, CEO-Level Negotiation, Vendor Replacement, and Delivery

The first step was a structured assessment of the project's actual status — reviewing the Statement of Work against what had been delivered, cataloging open items and defects, and separating vendor-caused issues from client-caused issues. This work formed the foundation for everything that followed: no negotiation can succeed without an honest, documented accounting of what was committed, what was delivered, and what remained.

Full On Consulting then entered into direct negotiations with the owners of the eCommerce services firm — going line by line through the SOW commitments, the documented delivery failures, and the financial impact on the client. The result was a negotiated agreement on the remaining deliverables, a go-live plan, and a final list of outstanding activities. For a brief period, it appeared the project would finally cross the finish line with the original vendor.

Then — with go-live one month away — the vendor pulled their entire project team and presented the client with a new support agreement as a condition of continuing. At the same time, the hosting provider chose this moment to double their annual hosting fees, making renewal a condition of the final go-live. Both national firms had calculated that the client's urgency and dependency gave them leverage — and they used it.

Full On Consulting escalated both situations to the CEO level. The client's CEO and the eCommerce services vendor's CEO were brought together directly to negotiate terms and approve the path forward. A parallel negotiation was conducted with the hosting provider's leadership. Both conversations were direct: the client had been harmed by both vendors, the terms being demanded were unreasonable, and neither vendor should expect that their national brand reputation would shield them from accountability.

At this point, a fundamental decision was made: given the demonstrated untrustworthiness of both vendors and the significant technical deficiencies in the existing implementation, continuing to invest in these relationships was not in the client's interest. Full On Consulting identified and engaged a new eCommerce services provider to assess the existing implementation, remediate the technical issues — including the critical security vulnerabilities — correctly implement the remaining features and integrations, and deploy the platform. The new hosting environment was also renegotiated.

The new vendor confirmed what the technical review had already suggested: the original implementation was not production-ready. The site had no authorization framework — meaning any user could access any content without authentication — creating direct cybersecurity exposure. Platform patches had been overwritten, breaking upgrade paths. Core integrations had been built incorrectly, requiring rework rather than extension. The remediation effort was significant, but it was the only path to a platform the client could actually trust.

Result: Platform Delivered, CEO Credibility Restored, IT Credibility Rebuilt

After two and a half years of delays, broken promises, and vendor misconduct, the eCommerce platform was delivered. The client had the strategically critical technology it had committed to years earlier — finally ready to support the revenue initiatives, marketing programs, and business unit growth plans that had been on hold throughout the delay.

The CEO, who had been under sustained board pressure over the project's delays and financial impact, was able to close the chapter on the most visible IT failure the organization had experienced in years. The board's questions about both delivery and budget oversight had answers. The strategic plan could move forward.

IT's credibility — which had been significantly damaged by two and a half years of failed promises it could not control — was restored. The organization now had an external perspective on what had actually gone wrong: the failures were vendor-caused, not IT-caused. Full On Consulting's presence had provided the independent assessment, the executive-level negotiation capability, and the vendor replacement decision that IT alone could not have executed.

The CFO, whose lack of financial transparency to the CEO and board had compounded the organization's exposure throughout the engagement, departed the company. The organization emerged from the engagement with a delivered platform, a new and trustworthy implementation partner, a remediated and secured codebase, and a clear-eyed understanding of what to demand from technology vendors in future engagements.

This engagement demonstrates what experienced IT project recovery consulting delivers: the ability to assess what is truly broken, the credibility to negotiate at the executive level, the judgment to replace vendors when the situation demands it, and the execution discipline to finally deliver what the organization was promised — regardless of how complicated the path to get there.