It’s true that such companies will learn how to appeal to shoppers beyond the narrowest segments of the population. But if a company thinks it can use outside distributors to get around competitive pressures, keep in mind that if even one dealer stays in business, he or she will help make more sales for the entire network. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is clearly a product of these sorts of forces.

A case in point is My Baby Shower, a wedding registry that was the No. 1 site for baby registry sales in the United States for an awful long time. But what made the company stand out? Clearly marketing and internet communications were crucial. But the most important factor was management: founder Max Gow’s very specific vision of what would make a registry worth using.

Gow’s company doesn’t practice what many Internet entrepreneurs do: they take credit for the power of their platform and leave the actual work of building it to others. That approach seems to work when it comes to Facebook and Twitter but may be less successful with ecommerce sites. Here are a few things to think about, not just when you’re building a startup, but when you’re in a growing company.

1. Understand exactly what customers want

Companies like My Baby Shower made it because they understood the basic problems that pregnant women faced, and then spent a long time trying to fix them. For a company to be successful, it needs to be an expert in the specific areas that are relevant to its customers. The conditions of any particular market—from the age of the median customer to the tastes of the typical customers—are going to matter less than the ability to execute a strategy that addresses those conditions.

The beauty of the internet is that there’s no excuse not to have that knowledge. Any potential partner who takes your business as a done deal without testing their assumptions is just gambling.

2. Avoid shouting yourself off the roof

When My Baby Shower was still in operation, there was little doubt that my daughter “had to be an Alexa,” as the website insisted. The company made a point of selling e-readers, very literally measuring them in photographs against boxes sent by other merchants on the site. When Amazon launched its Echo line, what Amazon neglected to tell those merchants was that any location that sold Apple and Amazon music products was excluded, preventing many small businesses from taking advantage of a powerful new distribution channel. 

3. Create an aggregated product catalog

None of this would be possible without the massive networks of customers that Amazon, Walmart, and Amazon Prime do. When those companies come knocking, they won’t buy everything they want, but they will focus on those things that customers really need. The best approach, both for eBay and Etsy, is a product catalog that’s divided up into categories and shoppable properties. I should probably mention the obvious lesson: don’t get too special-interest or crafty. Amazon and Walmart have learned that many customer groups aren’t interested in shopping for things that are beyond their means. Similarly, give people what they like—keep the look accessible and relevant. 

4. Don’t give yourself up to competition 

In the book The Entrepreneur’s Advantage, entrepreneur Bill D’Alonzo, a fellow at Harvard Business School, authoritatively documents the impact that Amazon’s management did on the evolution of the business. D’Alonzo says that by the time Amazon’s original CEO Terry Semel came to take over, Semel realized that Amazon had become too conservative, too reliant on trade routes to deliver products, and too restrictive when it came to shipping standards. At that point, sales grew 10-fold. “Amazon reached its apex when it was willing to pursue (guerrilla) competition,” D’Alonzo wrote. He recommended that every company trying to do big things “run as if there was a pizza box on top of your head and no one to ask.” 

5. Hold your sales teams to standards 

That’s a piece of advice you don’t hear often. Most company managers in ecommerce know that when Amazon, Walmart, and others open new countries and expand, it’s going to cause ripples in your distribution channels, but they don’t find any obvious way to cope. To stay competitive, your sales people need to be expert at adapting to change. In the age of digital, that’s a survival skill of a very high order.