Retail engineering for the week everything spikes
Retail systems fail in predictable places, the catalogue when it grows, the site when traffic peaks, the support queue when both happen at once. Those are engineering problems with known shapes, and we have spent years on all three.
The systems that decide whether the order lands
Retail software is judged on a handful of moments: the product page loading, the search returning something relevant, the checkout not failing, and the customer getting an answer afterwards.
Storefronts built to convert
Product, category and checkout pages engineered against field Core Web Vitals rather than a lab score, because the shopper on a three-year-old Android is the one you are losing.
Catalogue systems at scale
Large SKU counts with variants, localisation and frequent price changes. Indexing, caching and admin tooling that stay usable when the catalogue triples rather than degrading quietly.
Peak-traffic readiness
Load tested against your own worst hour. Caching layers, queued writes and autoscaling arranged so the sale event is a revenue day instead of an incident review.
Replatforming without the bloodbath
Phased migration with rankings preserved, order and customer data verified, and a rollback at each stage. The horror stories almost always trace back to a big-bang cutover.
Support agents on your order data
Where is my order, can I return this, why was I charged twice, answered by an agent with real access to your order and shipping systems, escalating with context when it should not decide alone.
Search and merchandising
Semantic search that copes with how people actually type, plus recommendations trained on your own behaviour data rather than a generic model guessing at your assortment.
The things you can actually move
Speed measured in the field
Real-user LCP and INP tracked continuously, with a performance budget enforced in CI so improvements do not quietly decay over the next twenty releases.
A checkout that holds
Treated as its own engineering problem: fewer steps, resilient payment handling, and honest error states instead of a spinner that never resolves.
Support that stops scaling with orders
Agents absorb the repetitive contact volume so your team spends its time on the cases that genuinely need a person's judgement.
Merchandising your team can run
Admin tooling and rules that merchandisers use without filing a ticket. Every workflow that needs an engineer is a bottleneck with a salary attached.
Diagnose before you spend
Read the funnel
Field performance data, search analytics, checkout drop-off and support ticket categories. Four sources that between them usually explain where the orders are going.
Fix by revenue impact
The ranked list gets worked top down and shipped continuously. Most stores see real improvement well before a replatforming conversation is warranted.
Then the structural work
Replatforming, headless, marketplace expansion or agents, once the cheap wins are gone and the constraint is genuinely the platform rather than the configuration.
What we build with
Questions retailers ask
Reviews
