E-commerce & Retail

Performance Optimization

Every 100ms of latency costs you conversions. We’ve optimized e-commerce platforms that had become slow through years of accumulated features, integrations, and technical debt. The work involves profiling to find actual bottlenecks (not the ones everyone assumes), fixing the problems that matter, and sometimes accepting that certain features need to be reconsidered entirely.

We’ve delivered 5x performance improvements on production systems, not through magic but through systematic analysis and focused optimization. At profishop.de, a B2B trade-equipment platform, the work spanned team building, architecture refresh, and performance optimisations across the stack. Usually the biggest gains come from a handful of changes: database query optimization, caching strategies, removing unnecessary work from the critical path. The skill is knowing where to look and what changes will actually move the needle.

Platform Architecture

E-commerce platforms accumulate complexity: product catalogs, inventory management, pricing engines, checkout flows, payment integrations, order management, fulfillment, returns. Each piece needs to work reliably, and they all need to work together. We design architectures that keep this complexity manageable: clear boundaries between systems, well-defined interfaces, the ability to change one thing without breaking everything else.

We’ve also done the platform migrations: moving from monoliths to services, replacing legacy systems, re-platforming from one vendor to another. These are high-risk projects when they go wrong, and we approach them with appropriate caution: careful planning, incremental migration, extensive testing, and fallback plans. Floriday, a platform we built with McKinsey Design for the Dutch flower-auction industry, replaced decades-old trading flows with a modern multi-sided marketplace.

Scaling for Peak Load

Black Friday, flash sales, viral moments: e-commerce traffic is spiky in ways that most software doesn’t have to handle. We’ve built systems that survive 10x traffic spikes without falling over: auto-scaling infrastructure, graceful degradation, the ability to shed load without losing orders. The work happens before peak season, in load testing and capacity planning, so that when the traffic hits, the system just handles it.

Retail Beyond the Web

Some of our retail work is the physical-meets-digital kind. Tap to Go, a checkout-free convenience-store concept for Albert Heijn (with McKinsey Design), turned a mobile app and a shelf-tag scan into a complete service. Fit For Free / SportCity was a digital fitness product spanning mobile, web, and in-club experience. When retail is more than a basket-and-checkout flow, the engineering and service design have to move together.

Deep History in E-commerce

Our e-commerce work goes back to the founder-only shop days. Head of IT at ROCKnSHOP, where a small online retailer scaled into a professional e-commerce operation and order-handling time fell by an order of magnitude. Interim CTO at Actindo, an e-commerce ERP platform: shop connectors, query optimisation, caching, the kind of unglamorous performance work that compounds. The patterns showing up in modern B2B e-commerce platforms — checkout latencies, query hotspots, integration sprawl — are familiar from work going back fifteen years.

E-commerce was our first industry. We built platforms, optimized systems, dealt with the reality of traffic spikes and the pressure of revenue that stops when the site stops. That early experience shapes how we think about reliability, performance, and the business consequences of technical decisions.

We’ve worked across the e-commerce stack: frontend performance and user experience, backend systems and integrations, infrastructure and operations. We understand how the pieces fit together and where problems typically emerge as platforms grow.

These days, e-commerce technical work often intersects with other challenges we handle: legacy modernization when platforms have aged, due diligence when investors are evaluating e-commerce companies, architecture work when systems need to scale to the next level. The e-commerce context informs all of it.