Industry
E-Commerce software.
Commerce is one of the few places where a technical metric maps directly to revenue: slower pages sell less. But the harder problem is usually inventory truth across channels, which is where most platforms quietly fail.
What shapes the architecture
Constraints that are specific to this sector.
These are the things that would be wrong or meaningless if written about a different industry. They are design inputs, not compliance paperwork added at the end.
- 01
Catalogue is static, cart is not
Product pages should be prerendered and revalidated on change. Cart and pricing are per-session and belong at the edge. Conflating the two makes everything dynamic and slow.
- 02
Oversell is an architecture problem
Selling stock you do not have comes from treating inventory as eventually consistent across channels. Reservation at add-to-cart, with expiry, is the fix.
- 03
Payment state is not order state
Authorised, captured, settled and refunded are distinct. Modelling payment as a boolean on the order guarantees reconciliation pain.
- 04
Peak traffic is scheduled
Sale events are known in advance, which means load can be rehearsed rather than discovered. Untested capacity is a decision, not bad luck.
Typical work in e-commerce.
- Headless storefronts
- Product information management
- Cart, checkout and payments
- Inventory and order management
- Search and merchandising
- Returns and after-sales
What it has to talk to.
- Shopify
- Stripe
- Razorpay
- Algolia
- ERP connectors
Integration surfaces are where most sector projects actually fail. We treat each one as a boundary with its own translation layer, rather than letting an external format leak into the domain model.
Reference build
How we'd build it, decisions included.
An illustrative architecture for this sector — the problem, the approach, and the alternatives we rejected with reasons.
Other sectors
Explore the rest.
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