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You don't need an agency to start with AI

A PAYE puzzle across three systems solved in minutes, a travel assistant on WhatsApp, and why most of the business doesn't need an agency to start with AI. The third post in our series, with a data protection warning from our DPO.

Installing Ucommerce 9.7 on Sitefinity 15.4

How to install Ucommerce 9.7 on a fresh Sitefinity 15.4 site, including the Lucene 4.8 patch and the J2N 2.1.0 hint path fix that stops installs failing.

Why is our invoice out by a few pence and nobody can explain it?

Your website and ERP round VAT at different points, so a price stored to two decimals drifts by pennies per order. Here's the arithmetic and the fix.

Fill the gaps with AI before you replace the core

Most businesses point AI at a process they already run. Our biggest gains came from the jobs we'd always meant to do, from log monitoring to root cause analysis, along with a lesson in how confidently an agent can be wrong.

Why did our orders stop when every system said it was running fine?

Orders stopped but every system looked fine? Your site likely waited on a live ERP or supplier lookup. Fetch prices on a schedule and store them locally.

The four stages every developer goes through with AI

Every developer who joins our AI-led projects goes through the same four stages, and the third decides whether it works. Our timelines barely moved. The thoroughness of what we ship did, and that brings a cost of its own.

Serilog enrichers: the hidden cost of every log line

Serilog enrichers run on every log event, so an innocent property can quietly hit your database thousands of times an hour. What we learnt logging Ucommerce order IDs, buffering logs in memory and destructuring EF entities, with the fixes we now use on every project.

Umbraco Commerce payment retries: the hidden order number trap

Cancel a payment, come back and pay, and Umbraco Commerce may issue a new order number and overwrite the first attempt. Here's what that means for payment history, customer service and logging, and how to plan for it.

How We Decide Which Commerce Engine an Umbraco Project Gets

Asked at Codegarden when we switched to a commerce plugin, the honest answer is that we didn't switch. Our own engine still trades, uCommerce takes the complex builds, and Umbraco Commerce earned the mid-market tier one small project at a time. Here's how a platform earns its place.

AI Agents Won't Wait for Your Overnight Stock Sync

Two of the three sites in our Christmas experiment ran delayed stock feeds with ring-fenced allocations. They showed "out of stock" while the warehouse was full. That leak cost them 10x in revenue - and with AI agents joining the buying journey, stale data is about to get pricier.

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You don't need an agency to start with AI

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More articles

Installing Ucommerce 9.7 on Sitefinity 15.4

Why is our invoice out by a few pence and nobody can explain it?

Fill the gaps with AI before you replace the core

Why did our orders stop when every system said it was running fine?

The four stages every developer goes through with AI

Serilog enrichers: the hidden cost of every log line

Umbraco Commerce payment retries: the hidden order number trap

How We Decide Which Commerce Engine an Umbraco Project Gets

AI Agents Won't Wait for Your Overnight Stock Sync

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