These notes describe kinds of work, not named clients. Confidential figures, brands and contracts stay off the page.
01 · Preview
Mail-order and web channels describing the same product, then taking payment before picking starts.
A familiar UK problem: the printed list, the website and the warehouse had become three slightly different businesses.
01 · Explanation
One product record. Stock published as an event. Payment capture as the gate to fulfilment. Staff no longer reconciling availability by hand between channels.
The interface was kept small: catalogue fields the warehouse already understood, inventory reservations, and payment gateway events returned to the order. Nightly files that nobody trusted were retired from the critical path.
Orders enter as a single operational sequence. Exceptions — declined cards, missing SKUs — land on a queue instead of in someone’s inbox folklore.
Ask about similar work02 · Context
Stock lived in the warehouse system and was copied, late, into each channel. Overselling was a weekly conversation. The dense part of the work was naming every place a number was being edited.
We listed SKUs with dual identities, locations that were not locations, and marketplace buffers that had become unofficial stock rooms. No new platform until that picture was shared.
Computer systems design here was mostly subtraction: fewer writers of the same figure, and an API that answered “how many can I sell” in language a storefront can use.
The clean result: selling channels read reservations from one inventory service. Adjustments still happen in the warehouse, where the goods are.
03 · Image
An online store is easy to launch and expensive to keep honest. This engagement treated the shopfront as a reader of the same product and payment contracts as the warehouse.
Retail software development covered the unglamorous screens: refunds, replacements, and the few merchandising rules that a generic theme will not express. E-commerce solutions work here was less about visual novelty and more about not inventing a second catalogue.
Mobile commerce used the same APIs. If a size is gone, it is gone on every surface at the same moment.
04 · Statement
One listing record, reused across the marketplace and the owned store.
Rules for who may offer a SKU, and what happens when they cancel.
Payment and fulfilment events returned to the same operational queue.
A short contract, not a second merchandising team living inside the marketplace.