Blog
Notes from building commerce operations software
Mostly about the unglamorous parts: reconciling payouts, keeping stock honest, and why a number you cannot explain is worse than no number at all.
The margin you report is not the margin you keep
Payment fees, return shipping and the cost of the box are all real, and none of them appear in your storefront's revenue figure. A walk through what to subtract, in what order, and why the answer changes which products you should promote.
By Amara Osei
Why your inventory count drifts, and how a ledger fixes it
A stock number is a conclusion. Storing only the conclusion means that when it is wrong, nobody can explain why. Storing the movements instead turns a mystery into an audit.
Rate limits are not an error state
Every marketplace API will throttle you. Treating that as a failure produces alert fatigue and lost orders; treating it as backpressure produces a system that degrades gracefully. What that looks like in practice.
Return reason codes are the cheapest product research you will ever run
Customers tell you exactly what is wrong with a product when they send it back. Most sellers throw that away. Six codes, applied consistently, will change what you stock next quarter.
What we learned reconciling 40,000 marketplace payouts
Settlement reports disagree with order totals more often than you would hope. The three most common causes, and how to tell a rounding difference from a genuinely missing payment.
Forecasting demand without a data science team
Seasonality, trend and lead time get you most of the way. A plain explanation of what a reorder point actually is, why safety stock is not padding, and when to distrust the model.
One inbox, seven channels: what actually breaks
Unifying customer conversations sounds simple until you meet WhatsApp's 24-hour window, Instagram's app review, and SMS opt-out law in four jurisdictions. An honest account.
The case against a single 'source of truth'
Marketplaces own their order data and always will. Pretending otherwise produces sync loops and lost writes. What it means to be authoritative about some things and deferential about others.
Pricing a bulky product when shipping decides the margin
For anything over two kilos, the carrier rate is the pricing decision. How to build a rate rule that stops your rate shopper picking express for a cushion.
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