01 · The challenge
The platform survives peak traffic but oversells the one product everyone wants.
How we answer it
Explicit inventory reservation semantics with defined behaviour under contention, load-tested against modelled peak concurrency.
Retail & Commerce
Built for the day everything happens at once.
Commerce platforms, fulfilment orchestration and merchandising tools engineered for peak — and for the ordinary Tuesday that funds it.
- Peak-tested
- Composable commerce
- Sub-second storefronts
The sector
Peak is an architecture problem, not a hosting problem
Autoscaling handles the front end. What fails on the biggest day is inventory contention, a payment provider timing out, and a fulfilment queue that quietly stops draining.
We design commerce systems around those failure modes: idempotent order handling, inventory reservation with defined behaviour under contention, and degradation paths that keep the checkout open when a peripheral service goes down.
- Load-tested against modelled peak
- Defined degradation paths
- Inventory contention handled explicitly
- Core Web Vitals as a budget
Sub-sectors we serve
- Direct-to-consumer
- Marketplaces
- Grocery
- Fashion
- B2B commerce
Regulation we build to
- PCI DSS
- GDPR
- WCAG 2.2 AA
- Consumer protection regulations
Peak traffic absorbed
Against modelled baseline, no degradation
Conversion uplift
Following storefront performance work
Where we help
What we build in commerce
Storefront engineering
Fast, accessible storefronts built on composable architecture, with performance treated as a budget rather than an aspiration.
- Headless commerce
- Performance budgets
- Experimentation
Order orchestration
The layer between the storefront and the warehouse: sourcing, allocation, splits and the exception handling that dominates real volume.
- Order routing
- Inventory reservation
- Exception workflows
Merchandising tools
Internal tools your merchandising team will actually use, built around their calendar rather than the data model.
- Catalogue management
- Pricing + promotions
- Campaign scheduling
Personalisation
Ranking and recommendation grounded in measured uplift, with a clear read on what the model is worth.
- Ranking models
- Experiment design
- Uplift measurement
Peak readiness
Load modelling, game days and degradation planning ahead of the trading period that decides the year.
- Load modelling
- Game days
- Runbook rehearsal
What the sector is dealing with
02 · The challenge
A monolithic commerce suite where every change waits for a quarterly vendor release.
How we answer it
Composable migration: the storefront and the fastest-moving capabilities come out first, the suite becomes a back-office system.
03 · The challenge
Personalisation nobody can prove is working.
How we answer it
Experiment infrastructure with holdout groups, so every model has a measured uplift rather than an implied one.
04 · The challenge
Storefront performance that degrades quietly with every marketing tag added.
How we answer it
Performance budgets enforced in CI, with third-party scripts loaded under a governed policy.
Stack
Technologies we use here
Also relevant
Services we bring to this sector
FAQ
Questions we are asked
Four months for the first year, less once the practice is established. The load model and the degradation plan are the long-lead items; the engineering fixes they reveal are usually quick.
Get ahead of the next peak
Start with a load model and a degradation plan — the two things that turn peak from an event into a Tuesday.