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.
Topic
200k Mid Market Ecommerce
A collection of 14 posts
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"It Depends Who's Asking": Why Complex Pricing Breaks Most E-Commerce Platforms
How much is this product? €12.99. Or €11.50. Or €9.80, depending who's asking. Complex pricing is how B2B works, and it's one of the most reliable reasons businesses outgrow templated platforms. Featuring the silicone tubing with a price matrix from a sci-fi film.