Why Young Entrepreneurs Are Building ECommerce Empires (And Why The Old Ones Keep Losing)

TL;DR- For this article, many freelancers and agencies who don’t care about your business success and growth will hate me (but those who truly care about you will love it).
This is the one article you MUST read on Selldone. Take the next 15 minutes to go through it—it will change your life if you want to sell or start a business and haven’t devoured the books of Peter Thiel, Seth Godin, Jack Trout, Al Ries, Paul Graham, or watched Y Combinator’s videos yet.
It’s a MUST-MUST-READ.

I’m Mehrdad, the founder of Selldone, and I’ve spent years helping entrepreneurs launch online stores. In that time, I’ve noticed a fascinating trend: young entrepreneurs are often racing ahead in ecommerce success, while many older entrepreneurs (even those with business experience) tend to get stuck. Today, I want to share my personal observations on why this happens, and how anyone—young or old—can choose the path of success. This isn’t just theory; it’s a story of mindset and focus, sprinkled with lessons I learned building Selldone and watching what works (and what doesn’t) in the real world.

Imagine Alex ( I can not tell their real name here), a young entrepreneur in their 20s, eager to launch an online store selling handmade jewelry. Alex chooses Selldone, a platform known for its no-code, all-in-one ecommerce solution. Within a day, Alex lists their products, sets up filters for easy browsing, and creates detailed product pages with images, videos, and customer reviews. They then focus on promoting their store on Instagram and TikTok, driving traffic and seeing sales within the first week. Alex's store ranks well on Google thanks to Selldone's built-in SEO engine, and they leverage features like discounts and gift cards to boost conversions.

Now, consider Bob, an older entrepreneur in his 50s, with years of traditional retail experience. Bob opts for a platform like woocommerce, drawn by its beautiful templates. He spends months designing the perfect home page, tweaking menus, and crafting a stunning landing page. However, when customers visit, they quickly navigate to the product pages, only to find them lacking in detail and functionality. Bob struggles with sales, as his focus on aesthetics hasn't translated into a customer-centric shopping experience.

The Fallacy of Fancy Landing Pages

When I started working with new shop owners, I saw a common mistake: obsessing over the homepage design. I’ve met seasoned entrepreneurs who spent months perfecting their landing page—the colors, the sliders, the elaborate welcome message—believing this would make or break their business. The irony? Customers don’t care about a fancy homepage. Shoppers come to your site with a goal: find the product they need, as quickly as possible​

They might click through from a Google search straight into a product page, or they’ll skim your categories and use filters to narrow down choices. If your site doesn’t let them do that fast, they’ll bounce to somewhere that does.

Customers value being able to quickly find the right product and see all its details, far more than having a visually elaborate homepage.

Why Young Entrepreneurs Win

Young entrepreneurs are winning the ecommerce game because they understand what customers really want: a seamless shopping experience. They focus on creating fast, informative product listing pages with filters and detailed product pages, rather than spending time on glamorous home pages. This approach allows them to list products quickly, promote them on social media, and drive sales, often using platforms like Selldone for its operational efficiency.

The Pitfall of Older Entrepreneurs

Older entrepreneurs might get caught up in perfecting home pages and landing pages, thinking these will attract customers. However, customers typically search on Google, find a product, and decide based on the product page's information, not the home page's design. This focus can delay their progress and hinder sales, as they miss the mark on what drives purchases.

Here’s what a typical online shopper truly cares about when they land on an ecommerce site:

• Finding the right product quickly! Clear navigation, search bar, and product filters help them jump from the homepage to the exact item they want in seconds​.
• Detailed product information! Once they find the item, they want to see rich content on the product page—multiple photos, maybe a video, detailed specs, reviews, etc. This is where buying decisions happen, not on a generic welcome blurb.
• Smooth checkout experience! They care that adding to cart and checking out is easy and fast, without hiccups.

Notice what’s on that list: a dazzling, perfect homepage design!!! Don’t get me wrong, your site should look professional, but pouring weeks into polishing a landing page is a trap. I call it the fallacy of fancy landing pages. I’ve seen younger entrepreneurs avoid this trap instinctively—they throw up a simple, clean homepage and then immediately focus on listing products and refining those product pages. Meanwhile, some older entrepreneurs labor over logo placement or an artsy banner, and their store hasn’t even launched. The young store owner starts selling while the older one is still moving pixels around. The lesson: focus on what care about (product discovery and info), not on vanity aesthetics. Just sell 0.001% of Airbnb then my entire team build airbnb website for you for free with the Selldone open source API/SDK/components! It's THE POINT...

The Customer Journey -> Why Product Pages Matter

Not make sense yet? Let me share others' results; research from the Nielsen Norman Group (UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Product Pages) highlights that customers rely on product pages to make buying decisions, seeking detailed information, high-quality images, and clear calls to action. A study by ConvertCart found that 87% of customers consider product content the most important factor, with 53% abandoning purchases if they can't find answers quickly. This underscores why young entrepreneurs prioritize functional product pages over home page design. Selldone excels here, offering long multimedia product descriptions, 3D/AR views, shipping guides, warranties, and specs, ensuring customers have all the information they need. Its SEO engine, auto-optimizes everything for fast Google rankings, aligning with the customer journey where most start with a search.

The Problem with Page Builders and Templates

Another pattern I’ve noticed is platform choice. Many first-time store owners (often the more mature folks who remember the early days of web design) gravitate towards website builders like Wix, GoDaddy, Webflow, or setting up WooCommerce on WordPress. On the surface, that makes sense—these tools promise an easy, code-free way to build a beautiful site. They entice you with hundreds of templates and design freedom. But here’s the catch: these platforms are in the business of selling , not supercharging your ecommerce operations.

I’ve watched older entrepreneurs get lost in the template gallery, picking a design and then tweaking fonts, layouts, menus… endless customization. Their dashboard is all about “choose a theme” and drag-and-drop building. Sure, you can make a pretty site, but can you, for example, handle complex product variants or automate your tax calculations easily? Often not without additional plugins or manual work. A page builder might give you a gorgeous storefront, yet lack robust inventory management or marketing tools out-of-the-box. It’s like getting a shiny car with a weak engine.

In contrast, I see younger entrepreneurs caring less about which cutesy template to use. They often start with a default look and invest their time in and . From my perspective, the over-emphasis on templates is a legacy of the past, when setting up a website itself was the hard part. Today, the hard part is not building a site—it’s building a business. If your ecommerce platform isn’t helping you run the business (beyond just looking nice), you’re on the wrong platform. I built Selldone with this exact philosophy in mind: function and scalability first, with design flexibility to support it (but not overshadow it). We deliberately ditched the template-centric mindset because it often leads entrepreneurs astray. Remember: 

A template might win you design awards, but it won’t guarantee a single sale. For sales, you need substance behind the style.

The Complexity of Plugin-Heavy Platforms

Perhaps the biggest hurdles I’ve witnessed come when entrepreneurs choose platforms that require a lot of plugins and add-ons to function fully. The prime example here is Shopify. Don’t get me wrong—Shopify is a popular and powerful platform. But as your needs grow, you often find yourself installing app after app: one for SEO, one for email marketing, one for reviews, one for advanced analytics, another for loyalty rewards, and so on. Pretty soon, your “simple” Shopify store has 5, 10, or 15 plugins bolted on. And each plugin is a separate piece of software, possibly by a different developer, with its own settings, subscription fee, and potential for conflicts or breakages.

One experienced developer described this problem well: the Shopify app model can become complex, filled with subscription-based plugins that offer no guarantee of future updates or reliable support.

He gave a scenario: imagine relying on eight different plugins, each costing $10–30 a month. That’s eight chances for something to go wrong whenever Shopify updates an API, and eight separate support teams you’d have to reach out to for fixes​. It’s a nightmare of fragmentation – a bit like trying to run a restaurant where the kitchen appliances all come from different vendors and don’t quite fit together. If one breaks, you have eight phone numbers to call and no single person accountable.

I’ve seen older entrepreneurs fall into this complexity trap, because they start with the mindset “I’ll just add features as I need them.” They install plugin after plugin, not realizing they’re slowly building a fragile tower of tech Jenga. The site might do everything , but along the way it became slow, costly, and hard to maintain. Younger entrepreneurs, perhaps due to having less patience (or less budget for a plugin shopping spree), tend to seek simpler, integrated solutions. They ask, “Can my platform do this without yet another plugin?” If the answer is no, they move on to one that can.

The truth is, wrestling with a patchwork of plugins is. It steals time you could spend on marketing or product development, and it often leads to headaches. Watching people go through this pain was one of the reasons I was determined to make Selldone an all-in-one system (more on that next). If you find yourself adding plugin after plugin just to get basic functionality, take a step back. There’s a better way that won’t require you to play tech support for a dozen different add-ons.

Choosing the Right Platform

When selecting a platform, young winners opt for Selldone, which offers professional, scalable ecommerce functionality in one package, including SEO, discounts, and community tools. In contrast, platforms like Webflow or Shopify might focus on templates or require multiple plugins, which can slow down setup. Selldone's all-in-one approach, with features like 3D/AR product views and cash-back programs, aligns with the needs of modern ecommerce.

Why It is the Best Choice for ECommerce

We built Selldone specifically to address the struggles I kept seeing over and over. In short, Selldone is an all-in-one, scalable ecommerce solution that lets you launch and start selling from day one, without the usual bottlenecks. Let me break down what that means in practice, and why I genuinely believe it’s the best choice for entrepreneurs who want to be winners in this space.

First, Selldone takes a “no-code, no-template, no-plugin” approach by design. This philosophy means anyone can get an online store up and running hassle-free, and fast​

You don’t need to be a developer (no coding required at all), you don’t have to wade through template marketplaces (we provide beautiful, flexible default layouts that you can adjust as needed without starting from scratch), and you won’t spend your life installing plugins to unlock features (everything you need is already built-in). The result? You can literally create an account, add your products, and have a functioning store in the same day – as easily as posting a photo on social media. I’ve seen 20-somethings do this in a morning, and even a “non-techie” 60-year-old do it in a weekend. It’s about removing roadblocks.

Second, Selldone is no-plugin! Remember those eight different support teams scenario? With Selldone, you have one platform that handles it all natively – your storefront, inventory, payments, marketing tools, customer rewards, shipping integrations, you name it. We designed it so you don’t have to stitch together separate systems. As one review aptly put it, Selldone eliminates the need to integrate multiple systems by providing ecommerce, accounting, POS, inventory management, order management, marketing, and more all on a unified cloud platform​

In plain language: it’s all under one roof. This not only saves you the headache of technical integration, but it also means everything just works together seamlessly. Your sales data talks to your inventory data, which talks to your accounting reports, without you lifting a finger or exporting a CSV.

Third, Selldone is built to scale with you. Today you might be a young entrepreneur selling 5 products out of your garage, and tomorrow you might have a catalog of 5,000 items and be shipping worldwide. The platform won’t break a sweat – it’s enterprise-grade behind the scenes, capable of handling millions of orders as you grow. I’ve always felt that your platform should be the last thing holding you back. If you have a spike in traffic from a viral TikTok or a celebrity shout-out, Selldone will scale automatically to handle it. You won’t be rushing to upgrade plans or add new infrastructure; it’s already handled.

Finally, we made Selldone accessible. Core features are free to start, because I don’t want cost to be the barrier for a passionate entrepreneur with a great idea. And when you do choose a paid plan for more advanced capabilities, it’s straightforward and transparent – no need to also budget an extra few hundred dollars for plugins or developers. The peace of mind that you’re on a platform that can do everything you need (and if there’s ever a new need, we’re probably already working on adding it) is priceless. It lets you focus on being an entrepreneur, not a part-time IT manager.

In summary, Selldone is the platform I wish existed when many of those struggling store owners began their journey. It embodies the principle that the tools should empower your business, not encumber it. By giving you an all-in-one, ready-to-go toolbox, Selldone frees you to concentrate on what really grows your business – which leads us to what the do differently.

Winners Focus on Operations, Not Just Appearance

After launch, what separates the successful ecommerce entrepreneurs (the “winners”) from those who lag behind (“losers”) is how they spend their time. Spoiler: winners spend it on operations and growth, not tweaking the site’s appearance endlessly. Here are the key areas where I see winners pour their energy:

SEO and Traffic Generation

Winners treat their product pages like the salespeople of their online store. They invest time to add multiple high-quality photos, maybe a 360° view or a how-to video, and clear, compelling descriptions. They might include size charts, FAQs, and customer reviews right on the page. A strong product page builds trust and answers questions, which dramatically increases conversion rates. I always advise sellers: spend 10x more time improving product pages than you do on the homepage. The entrepreneurs who take that to heart see results. With Selldone, they use the built-in media galleries and even embed YouTube demos without fuss. Meanwhile, the “losers” are often still stuck rearranging their homepage layout for the umpteenth time, instead of beefing up the content that actually convinces a customer to buy.

Customer Incentives (Discounts, Gift Cards, Rewards)

Look at any thriving online store run by a savvy entrepreneur, and you’ll find they have irresistible deals and loyalty builders. First-time buyer discounts, referral bonuses, holiday sale coupons, gift cards, you name it – these are not afterthoughts, they’re strategy. Winners set up these incentives early. They know a 10% off coupon can be the nudge that turns a curious visitor into a paying customer, and a good loyalty program can turn a one-time buyer into a repeat customer. Selldone comes with a full suite of marketing and incentive tools baked in (no plugin needed for things like discount codes or gift card functionality). In fact, features like customer clubs and tiered rewards are available by default to all our users. The most successful sellers jump on these features and get creative: for example, creating a VIP tier for customers who spend over $500, or a points system that encourages more frequent purchases. They’re actively fostering customer loyalty, which drives sustainable growth.

Community and Customer Engagement

The days of “sell and forget” are over. Winners in e-commerce build a community around their brand. This could mean a vibrant social media presence, an email newsletter with genuine updates (not just sales pitches), or even on-site engagement tools. I’ve seen entrepreneurs use Selldone’s built-in community features to host forums or Q&A for their customers, turning their store into a hub for like-minded shoppers. They respond to customer inquiries quickly, solicit feedback and reviews, and turn buyers into brand advocates. Older entrepreneurs sometimes underestimate this part – they come from a mindset of transactional sales. Younger entrepreneurs often excel here because they natively understand online communities and sharing. The result is free word-of-mouth marketing and a group of customers who feel valued. Winners make customers feel like part of a family, not just a number.

In short, winners act like operators, not just designers. They leverage every tool to market better, serve customers better, and improve the shopping experience continually. The good news is, none of this is gated by age. It’s about where you focus. I’ve met a 50-year-old who totally got it – he launched on Selldone and within a month was running Google Ads, tweaking product content, and setting up a loyalty program. He succeeded not because he was young, but because he chose to focus on operations. Sadly, I’ve also met a 22-year-old who did the opposite – he got obsessed with making the site look like a top-tier art gallery, spent all his money on a custom design, and had nothing left for marketing; his store flopped. The mindset was the differentiator.

Winners Launch Fast, Losers Delay – The Mindset Difference

At the end of the day, the difference between winners and losers in e-commerce often comes down to one simple thing: action. Winners launch their store quickly and get it in front of customers, while losers keep delaying until everything is “perfect” (which it never will be). This reminds me of a favorite quote from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman: ​

I take this to heart:

The winners live by this mantra — they get Version 1 of their store out there, imperfections and all, and start learning from real customer feedback. The losers tinker in stealth mode, often for months, only to realize too late that customers might not even care about half the things they spent time on.

I’ve seen it play out dozens of times. An eager young entrepreneur signs up on Selldone, launches their store in a day or two, and immediately starts promoting it on social media, running small ads, or pitching it to friends and influencers. The site isn’t fancy; it might even have some placeholder text still lurking around or a somewhat generic look. But guess what? She’s making sales in week one, and she’s gathering valuable data on what products people like, which marketing channels bring traffic, etc. Across the metaphorical street, an older (or just more cautious) entrepreneur says, “I’ll launch once I polish these last elements.” They change their homepage headline ten times, switch templates twice, add a bunch of apps… and still haven’t officially “opened” their online doors to the public. By the time they do, the momentum is gone and they’re starting from zero, months behind the other entrepreneur who’s already iterating and growing.

The truth can be a bit blunt: in ecommerce, speed and adaptability win. You gain nothing by waiting to launch, but you gain insight, revenue, and brand presence by launching early. If your landing page isn’t perfect, your customers will live. (Many probably won’t even see it if they come via a product link or search result anyway!) If your product lineup isn’t complete, start with what you have. Winners figure things out in motion; losers try to figure it all out in their head beforehand. One approach leads to progress, the other to paralysis.

Selldone was built to encourage the winning approach. I wanted to make it so straightforward to create an online store that there’s no excuse not to launch immediately. No need to wrestle with setup or back-end fiddling. Just add your products and go live. Then use that time you saved to do the real work: marketing, improving, and expanding your business.

In the end, it’s not really about youth versus age in absolute terms—it’s about mindset. Are you adopting the flexible, learn-as-you-go mindset that we often see in young entrepreneurs, or the overly cautious, perfection-seeking mindset that some older entrepreneurs have accumulated? The beauty is, you can choose your mindset starting today, regardless of your age or experience.

You can choose to be a winner or a loser.