Sign in Subscribe

Insights

Sharing our knowledge, experience and insights

Search the blog

AI Agents Won't Wait for Your Overnight Stock Sync

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.

Categories

200k Mid Market Ecommerce
Ecommerce
AI

Continue Reading

More articles

The month that vanished into Fridays off

Summer leave has fragmented into single days and long weekends. It's better for the people taking it, but it removes the run-up discipline that used to turn open questions into decisions, and projects are quietly losing weeks to it.

Sites are always under attack. You get used to it

Every website is being probed right now, and almost none of it is aimed at you specifically. Why attack volume has climbed since AI lowered the barrier to entry, what modern hosted checkouts really expose, and the low-cost changes that handle most of the noise.

The Plug-and-Play Myth: What Shopify's App Store Doesn't Tell You

"Can't we just use a plugin?" Plug-and-play is real, but only for businesses shaped like the plug. Why ERP-connected businesses end up paying bespoke prices for templated constraints, and why the fulfilment integration everyone fears is the easy part.

How We Price Projects We Can't Fully Scope Yet

How do you price a project you can't fully scope until discovery is done? Honestly: in bands that double, narrowed by discovery, then committed as a watermark figure with a visible contingency ceiling. Here's the model we use, including the bit we get wrong.

You're Not Buying a Website. You're Buying Operational Improvement

A client once briefed three agencies to build the same Christmas shop. We cost double, and our site made ten times the revenue. The lesson: nobody's really buying a website. They're buying operational improvement, and that changes how you price, pitch and choose.

AI agents can't buy what they can't read

AI agents read your site through its accessibility tree, the same structure screen readers use. That makes WCAG work commercially interesting for the first time. Here's what agents read, what the research does and doesn't prove, and why the AI framing is a trap worth avoiding.

Boring Technology Wins: Architecture for Mid-Market E-Commerce

Mid-market e-commerce architecture isn't complicated: Umbraco at the centre, the ERP as the source of truth, hybrid sync as the default. The complexity hides in the integrations, and the tell is always the same word: "just". Boring technology wins, and here's why.

Assume your software will outlive its end-of-life

We still run an Umbraco v4 site, on purpose. End-of-life is a date on the vendor's calendar, not a fact about your customer's business. Why the version you ship is the one worth designing for, and how to tell a managed risk from plain neglect.

Red Flags in E-Commerce Projects (From Both Sides of the Table)

"We just need a simple checkout." "The ERP integration should be straightforward." Four phrases that should make everyone in an e-commerce project slow down, plus the story of a site that made it to QA and never launched. Red flags, from both sides of the table.