July 8, 2026, Luboš Zápotočný
The e-shop without a CTO: seven decisions that go wrong
Vendor choice, hiring, hosting, ownership: the technical decisions that quietly go wrong when nobody senior owns them, and what a CTO would ask instead.
Between roughly ten and a hundred people, an e-commerce company is in a difficult position: too much technology to manage informally, too little to justify a full-time CTO. The gap doesn’t stay empty. It gets filled by whoever is closest (a founder, an agency, the most confident developer), and a series of decisions get made that nobody is qualified to veto. These are the seven we see go wrong most often, and the question a senior technical voice would have asked.
1. Choosing the platform by the demo. Platforms are bought on the polish of the admin and the promises of the sales call, then lived with for a decade of edge cases. The CTO question: what are our three most unusual requirements, and can we see them working, not promised, on this platform?
2. Choosing the agency by the pitch. The cheapest bid and the most polished presentation are both selection biases, not evidence. The failure surfaces two years later as lock-in: code in the agency’s private repos, infrastructure on their accounts, and the knowledge nowhere but their heads. The CTO question: if we part ways in twelve months, what exactly do we walk away with?
3. Hiring a senior developer when the problem is architecture, or an architect when the problem is throughput. Without someone who has seen both, the company overcorrects for its last bad experience. The CTO question: is our bottleneck deciding what to build, or building it?
4. Letting the plugin count become the architecture. Every plugin was a quick win. Fifty quick wins later, upgrades take a quarter and nobody can say which plugin owns the price calculation. The CTO question: for each of these, do we know what it does, and would we install it again today?
5. Inheriting infrastructure by default. The shop runs wherever the first developer put it, sized by guesswork, with customer complaints standing in for monitoring. It works until the first big campaign, which is precisely when it mustn’t fail. When checkout collapses under load that the servers should handle, that default becomes expensive. The CTO question: what happens at five times today’s traffic, and how do we know?
6. Not owning the accounts. Domain at the agency’s registrar, analytics under a freelancer’s Google account, deploy keys on a laptop that left with an employee. Nothing appears wrong while the relationship holds; when it ends, every one of those dependencies becomes a problem. The CTO question: can we enumerate every account the business depends on, and who controls recovery for each?
7. Treating performance as a launch task. The site was fast at launch; it’s been getting slower by one plugin and one banner at a time ever since, and nobody owns the number. Speed is an operations metric, like uptime. It needs an owner and a trend line. The CTO question: what was our LCP last month, and who noticed the change?
The pattern behind all seven
All seven are ownership failures: each decision was locally reasonable and nobody was responsible for the sum. The fix isn’t necessarily a hire: at this company size the CTO job is real but part-time, which is exactly why fractional CTO engagements exist. They buy a few hours a week of someone whose job is to ask the questions above while the decisions are still cheap to change.
If several of the seven apply to your company, the intro call is free.