What it changed
- An e-commerce platform built from scratch, from the first line of code.
- Engineering teams led across Australia, the United States and India.
- The hard parts of commerce solved for real: discounts, refunds, US sales tax and nexus, and APIs that scale.
The situation
Before Cloudless Labs, I was director of technology at a US e-commerce startup, building its platform from nothing. A startup moves fast, but commerce is unforgiving: every bug is someone's money, and every rule has an exception.
What I built
The platform itself, from scratch, and the teams that built it with me, in Australia and India, with regular trips to the States. Along the way, I went deep into the parts of e-commerce that look simple from the outside and aren't:
- Discounts and refunds. Stacked promotions, partial refunds, refunds of discounted orders: each has to reconcile to the cent, every time.
- US sales tax and nexus. Which states can tax you depends on where you have presence, how much you sell there and how many orders you ship, and every state has its own rules and rates. It's a maze, and getting it wrong is expensive.
- APIs that scale. Traffic that spikes on a campaign, and order flows that must never lose a payment, which is where I learned event-driven architecture the hard way.
This is also where I left the Microsoft stack for Node.js, open source and AWS, a move I explain in why I ended up on AWS.
Why it matters to you
If you sell online, the edge cases are the business. I've built them myself, from the database up, and know where they hide.