Retail & marketplaces

Retail load is not a curve, it is a cliff. The system is comfortable for most of the year and then has a handful of days that decide the commercial year. That makes capacity planning, caching, and failing gracefully matter far more than being efficient on a quiet Tuesday. We design for the cliff. Pages served from pre-built copies that survive the rest of the system having a bad day; stock levels that degrade to an honest "low stock" rather than selling somebody something that does not exist; and checkout separated firmly enough that a recommendations outage cannot take payment down with it. Load tests are run against the real setup, not a scaled-down copy that proves nothing. Search and catalogue are treated as a product in their own right. How relevant the results are gets measured rather than assumed, the index updates continuously instead of overnight, and the merchandising team gets controls they can use without waiting for a release. Typical engagements: making checkout reliable, re-platforming catalogue and search, keeping stock consistent across channels, and readiness work in the quarter before a peak trading period.