Commerce engineering
Storefronts that survive Black Friday.
ExploreIndependent studio · Delhi
We build online stores and web software for businesses that need it working.
We are a small team in Delhi. We build online stores, websites, mobile apps and the internal tools that sit behind them. The same people plan the work and write the code.
- Online stores
- Websites and web apps
- Mobile apps
- Custom software
What we do
All servicesSeven kinds of work, one team
Your project does not get passed between departments. The people who plan it are the people who build it, and they stay until it is live.
Composable & headless
Decoupled front ends on your existing backend.
ExploreWeb platforms
Applications, portals and marketing systems.
ExploreMobile products
Native and cross-platform apps people keep.
ExploreDesign & brand
Research, interface systems and identity.
ExploreGrowth marketing
Acquisition, lifecycle and measurement.
ExploreCustom software
Internal tools, integrations and data work.
ExploreNot sure which of these you need?
Most people arrive sure they need to rebuild everything. About a third actually do. The first week tells you which group you are in.
Platform depth
We have views on platforms, and we will explain them
Picking the wrong one costs you a year. These are the four we use most, and why we would choose each.
Past the theme ceiling, without leaving the platform
Custom Online Store 2.0 builds, Hydrogen storefronts, Shopify Functions and the app work that starts once the defaults run out.
- Hydrogen and Oxygen storefronts
- Checkout extensions and Functions
- Subscriptions, bundles and loyalty
- Shopify Plus B2B implementation
- Migration from Magento or WooCommerce
98
Median Lighthouse performance
Every platform engagement starts with the same question: what would have to be true for you not to replatform?
How we run migrationsBusiness models
Four kinds of selling, four different builds
What works for a subscription brand will hurt a wholesale business. We start with how you sell, then pick the platform.
B2B
Trade accounts, negotiated pricing, approval chains
Company hierarchies, requisition lists, credit terms and quote-to-order flows. We build the boring machinery that lets a sales team stop taking orders over email.
- Customer-group pricing
- Quote and approval workflows
- Purchase order and net terms
- Rep-assisted ordering
D2C
Own the relationship end to end
Storefronts built for repeat purchase — subscriptions, loyalty, first-party data and a lifecycle programme that does not depend on rented audiences.
- Subscription and replenishment
- Loyalty and referral
- First-party data capture
- Lifecycle automation
Marketplace
Many sellers, one trustworthy experience
Vendor onboarding, split payouts, commission logic and the moderation tooling that keeps quality from sliding as supply grows.
- Vendor onboarding and KYC
- Split payments and payouts
- Ratings and dispute handling
- Catalogue moderation
B2B2C
Sell through partners without losing the customer
White-label storefronts, partner portals and shared inventory across a network of resellers, franchisees or clinics.
- Multi-tenant storefronts
- Partner portals and reporting
- Shared inventory and fulfilment
- Co-branded experiences
Industries
Twelve industries we already know
Knowing an industry mostly means knowing which rules are real and which are just habit. These are the ones we know.
Retail & Commerce
Catalogue systems, checkout rebuilds and store operations tooling for brands selling direct at volume.
Hospitality & Travel
Booking engines, property systems and guest apps where availability logic has to be exactly right.
Property & PropTech
Listing portals, agent workflows and valuation tooling with search that behaves under real filters.
Health & Clinical
Patient-facing products and clinical tooling built under HIPAA and GDPR from the first commit.
Education & Learning
Learning platforms, assessment engines and institutional portals that survive term-start traffic.
Finance & FinTech
Payment flows, lending journeys and reconciliation tooling with an audit trail that stands up.
How we work
Four steps, and you can stop after any one
Each step gives you something you own. Nothing is held back to make you pay for the next bit.
- 01
Framing week
A paid week where we map the constraints, the existing systems and what success has to look like in numbers. You keep the output whether or not we continue.
- 02
Architecture & plan
A written technical plan with the trade-offs made explicit, a milestone schedule, and a fixed budget band for the first release.
- 03
Build in the open
Two-week increments, a preview URL from day three, and a Slack channel where your team can see the work rather than wait for a demo.
- 04
Launch & operate
Load testing, runbooks and monitoring before go-live, then a support window while your team takes the wheel — or a retainer if you would rather we kept it.
Technology
Where we apply itWe pick boring tools on purpose
We use tools you can hire for and we can hand over. Anything new has to solve a problem the usual choice cannot.
Front end
Next.jsReactTypeScriptTailwindHydrogenAstro
Back end
Node.jsFastifyNestJSLaravelPythonGo
Data
PostgresRedisElasticsearchBigQueryPrismaTemporal
Commerce
Shopify PlusBigCommerceAdobe CommerceWooCommerceStripeAlgolia
Mobile
SwiftKotlinReact NativeFlutterExpoFirebase
Platform
VercelAWSCloudflareTerraformDockerGrafana
Journal
Read the journalThings we have learned
Written by the people doing the work, about the decisions that turned out to matter most.
Commerce11 August 20269 min
Sequencing a composable migration so it can be cancelled at any point
Big-bang replatforms fail for the same reason big-bang anything fails: there is no safe moment to stop. Here is the order we move things in, and why the storefront always goes first.
Ines Vogel · Principal architect
Engineering28 July 20267 min
Performance budgets only work when they fail the build
Every team we meet has a performance target. Almost none of them have a mechanism that stops a regression from shipping. Those are very different things.
Marcus Oyelaran · Engineering lead
Studio9 July 20266 min
Why we charge for the first week, and give away the plan
Roughly one client in five takes our framing document and does the work in-house. We think that is a feature, and here is the reasoning behind it.
Sara Kilián · Managing partner
FAQ
Questions we get asked first
If the answer you need is not here, the fastest route is a thirty-minute call with someone who would actually work on it.
Online stores, websites and web apps, mobile apps, and internal tools. We also do the design and marketing work around them. We build things; we are not a staffing agency, though we do put people inside a client team when that team already has strong technical leadership.
With a paid first week. We look at what you already have, talk to the people who use it every day, and write a plan. The plan says how we would build it and what the trade-offs are. It is yours to keep, and about one client in five uses it to do the work themselves.
The first week is a fixed fee. After that we quote a price range per milestone rather than one number, because the honest answer changes as we learn the system. Most first releases take a team of three to five people, eight to sixteen weeks.
Yes, all of it, from the first line. The work sits in your repository, under your account, on your servers. There is nothing of ours you have to keep paying for.
One office in Delhi, in Bali Nagar. Everyone works from there. For clients elsewhere, at least four hours of every working day overlap with yours, and the people you meet in the first week are the people who build the thing.
That is most of what we do. We join your standups, review your code, and hand ownership across as the project goes on. The aim is that you stop needing us.
Want a second opinion before you spend the budget?
Half an hour with a senior engineer. No slides, and no sales call pretending to be something else.