nopCommerce is a big pile of awesome straight out of the box. We love it. That said, every business is different, and nopCommerce or even commercial plugins can't always faithfully represent how you do business. That's where you need to break free of the shackles, and go custom.
The Ninvoice have vast experience in ecommerce and we know that as soon as your business starts to scale, you'll need to start to automate.
One store we've worked was struggling with volumes (the sort of problem you love to have). It was no longer feasible to for someone to manually type the consignment details into UK Mail's website. Our team built some software which took order deals from the nopCommerce database, booked the consignment in with UKMail and printed the label for the packet.
Suddenly hours a day was saved and transcription errors were elimitated. Upon scanning the order the customers order was updated with shipping references, dispatch emails delivered. The customer experience overnight was vastly improved.
This is just one way that we have improved small ecommerce stores using technology.