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What Personalisation Looks Like at Scale: Lessons from 20 Years

After 20 years building e-commerce personalisation, the approaches that actually compound are rarely the clever ones. Tim Gaunt reflects on what consistently works, what he got wrong early on, and where personalisation is heading next.

Building a Personalisation Roadmap on a Realistic Budget

Most personalisation projects don't fail because of budget. They fail because nobody sequenced the work properly. Here's a practical twelve-month plan, split into three phases, that builds real personalisation capability without a platform purchase, a new hire, or a six-figure investment.

What a slow Chrome trace told us about a 2,000-product catalogue page

A client flagged that their largest product listing page was unresponsive on desktop and crashing on mobile. Smaller catalogues worked fine. We opened a Chrome trace, found a 14-second blocking task, and then another, and then another. Here's what we found, and what shipped.

Running Products Alongside Client Work: Why It Took Us 15 Years to Get This Right

After 15 years building products at TSD, we're only now structuring this properly. Running an agency and running a product need different mindsets. Project completion vs continuous iteration. Clear deliverables vs never being "done". Here's what we learned the hard way.

A Cautionary Tale on Platform Dependency: Why Our Shopify App Went From Daily Installs to Zero Overnight

Platform products give you faster time to market and built-in distribution. They also give you existential risk. When Reddit changed API pricing, Apollo went from multi-million pound business to dead overnight. Here's what happened when our Shopify app installs stopped, and how we manage risk now.

From Napkin Sketch to App: How We Validate Product Ideas

How do you decide what products to build? We assume everything takes three times longer than estimated and markets are three times smaller than we think. Sounds pessimistic. Turns out to be fairly accurate. Here's the validation framework we use at TSD to avoid wasting months on ideas nobody wants.

The Personalisation Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Vanity Ones to Ignore)

Most personalisation reports I see are full of the wrong numbers. Opens, clicks, coverage percentages. They look like progress, but don't tell you whether revenue moved. Here's what to measure instead, and a simple framework to report it without needing a data science team.

Error running Scratch Indexer in Sitefinity 15.3+ and uCommerce 9

We recently hit and issue when looking to upgrade a Sitefinity instance running uCommerce 9.7 to 15.3 and by extension 15.4 This presents itself in the form of an error when running the scratch indexer, which basically breaks the commerce engine and all site widgets when it

The Cold Start Problem: Why Most Personalisation Fails Before It Starts

The most common reason personalisation underperforms isn't the tool or the team. It's that the data collection window closed before anyone realised it had opened.

We Built an Open-Source MCP Server for Productive.io (and You Can Have It)

We built an open-source MCP server that connects your AI assistant to Productive.io. Over 40 tools for tasks, budgets, and more. Free, MIT-licensed, and ready to use.

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What Personalisation Looks Like at Scale: Lessons from 20 Years

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More articles

Building a Personalisation Roadmap on a Realistic Budget

What a slow Chrome trace told us about a 2,000-product catalogue page

Running Products Alongside Client Work: Why It Took Us 15 Years to Get This Right

A Cautionary Tale on Platform Dependency: Why Our Shopify App Went From Daily Installs to Zero Overnight

From Napkin Sketch to App: How We Validate Product Ideas

The Personalisation Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Vanity Ones to Ignore)

Error running Scratch Indexer in Sitefinity 15.3+ and uCommerce 9

The Cold Start Problem: Why Most Personalisation Fails Before It Starts

We Built an Open-Source MCP Server for Productive.io (and You Can Have It)

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