Ecommerce platforms
The store is the easy part
Storefronts are largely solved. What breaks is everything behind it — catalogue accuracy, stock, pricing rules, fulfilment, returns and the integrations joining them to the rest of the business.
In short
Most ecommerce problems are operational rather than front-end. A store that converts badly is sometimes a design problem, but more often it is stock that is wrong, delivery promises the warehouse cannot keep, pricing rules the platform cannot express, or a checkout failing for one payment method nobody monitors. The work that pays is usually behind the storefront, in the systems that decide what is available, at what price, and what happens after the order is placed.
When it applies
Signals this is the work
If more than one of these is true today, the problem is usually further along than it looks from the outside.
Stock shown does not match stock held
Overselling, cancellations, and a manual reconciliation somebody runs.
Pricing rules live outside the platform
Customer-specific pricing, contract rates or volume breaks maintained in a spreadsheet because the platform cannot model them.
Orders are re-keyed into the ERP
The storefront takes the order; a person moves it into the system that fulfils it.
Returns are entirely manual
Every return is an email thread and a judgement call with no system behind it.
The catalogue is the bottleneck
Launching a product takes days because data is assembled by hand across several places.
How we do it
The sequence
- 01
Follow one order end to end
From click to delivery to invoice to return. Every handoff is where the failures actually are.
- 02
Fix product data at the source
One authoritative catalogue feeding the storefront, rather than the storefront being the place data is maintained.
- 03
Make stock honest
Real availability including allocation, inbound and reservations. Most overselling is an integration timing problem, not a warehouse problem.
- 04
Model pricing in the system
If the business has contract pricing and volume rules, the platform must express them or you will maintain them by hand forever.
- 05
Instrument the checkout
Payment failures, timeouts and validation errors monitored per method. Most stores discover a broken payment path from a customer.
- 06
Design the return path
Returns and exceptions are normal volume, not edge cases, and deserve the same engineering as the purchase.
What we will not do
The refusals
- Replatform to solve a problem that is about catalogue quality or stock accuracy.
- Build a custom storefront where Shopify, Magento or a similar platform would serve.
- Promise delivery dates the fulfilment operation cannot meet.
- Treat returns as an afterthought.
Questions
Before you ask
Tell us what isn't working.
One process, one system, one decision you are stuck on. We will come back with how we would approach it, what it would take, and whether it needs building at all.