E-commerce is one of the few corners of the web where engineering quality has a direct, measurable line to revenue. A 100ms improvement in LCP shows up in conversion. A flaky checkout loses you the whole basket. A miscounted inventory unit becomes a refund, a chargeback, and a 1-star review. I work with brands and platforms where the engineering bar is set by the P&L, not by an internal style guide.
Headless commerce became the default for a reason: the monolithic platforms are great for catalog management and operations, terrible for the kind of front-end iteration modern brands need. I build storefronts on Next.js backed by Shopify, BigCommerce, commercetools, or Saleor, with edge rendering on Vercel for global performance. The wins are real - sub-second LCP across geographies, double-digit conversion lifts on category pages, and a frontend team that can ship without the platform team's permission.
Peak traffic is where commerce architecture earns its paycheck. Black Friday, a celebrity drop, a Reddit hug of death - your steady-state traffic is irrelevant if the spike kills you. I design systems with explicit capacity plans, queue-backed checkout, Redis-backed inventory locks, and circuit breakers around every third-party. The goal is graceful degradation, not heroic recovery: if Stripe is degraded, you queue and retry; if search is down, you fall back to category browse.
Personalization is where AI is genuinely changing commerce, and where most teams are still doing it wrong. Static "customers also bought" lists were a 2010 solution. The current frontier is vector-based product retrieval tied to session intent, generative on-site search, and post-purchase email content tailored at the individual level. I build personalization stacks that respect user signals without burning your margins on compute - embedding-cache hierarchies, candidate generation in Postgres, reranking with smaller models.
Operations is the silent half of commerce. OMS, WMS, ERP integrations, returns, fraud screening, tax (Avalara, TaxJar), and chargebacks (Signifyd, Riskified). I help teams architect the back-of-house so the storefront feels magical and the warehouse stays sane. Idempotent webhooks, exactly-once order ingestion, and reconciliation jobs that catch the edge cases before finance does. See a speed-optimization case study or start a project.