01
Peak traffic is the whole year in one day
A sale event can be twenty times normal load for four hours. Capacity that is fine in November is the reason a launch fails in December.
ThinkDebug
Practical deep dives on software architecture, AI systems, and scaling digital products - drawn from the work we ship.
Storefronts and checkout tuned for conversion at scale.
We build the systems retail runs on: storefronts and checkout, the catalogue and pricing behind them, and the order, inventory and fulfilment flows that decide whether what a customer bought can actually be shipped.
Retail punishes latency and rewards accuracy. A checkout that takes an extra second measurably loses orders, and a stock figure that is thirty seconds stale turns into an oversell, a refund and a support ticket. So we treat the read path and the inventory ledger as separate problems: cache aggressively for browsing, and keep a single authoritative source for what is actually available to sell.
Most engagements are not greenfield. There is a platform already - Shopify, Magento, a custom build - plus an ERP, a WMS and a payment provider that all disagree slightly. The work is usually in the integration layer, and that is where the risk sits.
The constraints that shape every build in this sector, and the ones teams usually meet too late.
A sale event can be twenty times normal load for four hours. Capacity that is fine in November is the reason a launch fails in December.
Warehouse, storefront and marketplace each hold a number, and they drift. Overselling costs a refund and a customer; underselling costs the margin quietly.
Conversion tracks page speed closely enough that performance is a commercial decision, not an engineering preference.
Failed payments, surprise costs and forced account creation are the three things that empty a basket after the customer had already decided to buy.
Order volumes that a storefront handles comfortably will queue behind a nightly batch job in the system that has to actually fulfil them.
Most catalogue search fails on synonyms, plurals and the way people actually type. A customer who searches and finds nothing rarely browses instead.
Swipe to read all 6
Each one is a system we have built before, not a capability we are willing to try.
Fast, crawlable storefronts on a headless stack, so merchandising can move without waiting for a deploy.
Checkout flows tuned for completion, with multiple providers, saved methods and clear failure handling.
One authoritative view of stock and orders across storefront, warehouse and marketplace channels.
Faceted search and ranking that tolerates how people really type, with rules merchandisers can control.
The integration layer between the storefront and the systems that price, pick and ship - usually the hardest part of the build.
Event tracking, funnels and experiment plumbing that report the same numbers your finance team does.
Engagements across sectors - the same team, the same standards.
Partnering with Thinkdebug to develop the Forever 52 mobile app has been a game-changer for us. They were always open to feedback, and it was clear they were as invested in our success as we were. What really sets them apart, though, is the amazing support we've received since the app launched. They’ve made sure the app continues to run smoothly and are always ready to fix any issues that come up.DMDhruv MehtaBusiness Head, Forever 52
Chosen for fit and long-term maintainability, never for novelty.
Send us the scope and we come back with an itemised estimate - no discovery fee, no obligation.
What we design and document against, from the first commit rather than the week before an audit.
Certification itself belongs to your entity and its assessor. What we provide is software built and documented so the assessment is about evidence rather than remediation.
Most of our work comes from clients we already shipped for. These are the reasons they give.
Budgets for page weight and interaction latency are set at the start and enforced in CI, not measured after launch when they are expensive to fix.
We model inventory as a ledger with reservations, so a basket holds real stock and an oversell becomes a design decision rather than a race condition.
Load is modelled on your busiest hour of the year, and we rehearse it before the event rather than discovering the ceiling during it.
Declines, timeouts and duplicate submissions all have defined behaviour, so a customer never pays twice and never loses a basket to a network blip.
The ERP and WMS usually stay. We build the layer between them properly instead of pretending the storefront is the whole system.
Ranking rules, promotions and content are controllable by the team that owns them, so a campaign does not need an engineer.
Let's start with you.
Your information stays private. We reply within 24 hours.
Still have a question we have not answered?
Ask an engineerWhat we build for e-commerce & retail, the work we have shipped, and what we have written about it.
