Reviews, integrations and due diligence for retailers whose stack grew faster than the plan for it.
Retail stacks are rarely designed. They accumulate, one supplier at a time, until nobody can say what a system costs or what would break if it were switched off.
The first job is usually not building anything. It is establishing what is actually there, what it costs and what it earns.
What follows is ordered by payback. The cheapest fix that removes the most pain goes first, regardless of how interesting it is.
If you need a full time engineering team, this is not that. It is one person establishing what should be built before you spend on building it.
Every system, what it costs, who depends on it and what happens when it fails. Usually the first document of its kind the business has had.
Licence fees are the easy part. The expensive part is the hours people spend working around a system, and that is the figure most businesses have never put a number on.
A roadmap sequenced by what it returns and when, not by what is newest. Anything without a clear payback is named as such and left out.
Integrations use real APIs with failure handling and alerting from the start. Nothing that depends on a screen layout staying the same.
Handover notes written for whoever picks it up next, on the assumption that will not be me.
For retailers whose stack has grown by accretion and now costs more than it returns.
For teams rekeying data between systems that were supposed to talk to each other.
For buyers, investors and owners who need to know what the technology is really worth.
Not quite the right fit? Short, focused engagements that answer a specific commercial question.
Pricing is bespoke to scope. Figures are a starting point, confirmed in writing before work starts.
Twenty minutes, no charge. Or email the detail and you will get a reply the same day.
He understands the business, he understands how to communicate the business needs to the development team, and is able to analyse and understand issues, bottlenecks and future problems. He has high standards and makes sure nothing is getting done without meeting those standards.
2 published engagements, each with the figures attached.
Secondhand gear only makes money if it is priced right at intake. I built Prism, the platform that values gear from live market prices in 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes, runs intake, inventory and listing, and sells across Shopify, eBay and Reverb from a single stock pool.
A £120m marketplace-dependent business needed its own channel. I moved worldofbooks.com from Magento to a headless Commercetools stack in three months, then scaled it from £100k to £4.7m a month across seven storefronts while growing the technology team to 75 and more.