Josh

A few years back, I was brought in to “speed up” a luxury apparel site doing over $20M in annual sales. The CTO thought it was just a CDN tweak or two. Their dev team thought it was “probably a caching thing.” Turned out, the real bottleneck was something nobody had looked at in years: […]

When most dev teams say they’re “building for scale,” what they actually mean is they’ve added a load balancer and are using a cloud provider that promises to “grow with them.” It’s comforting. It feels like future-proofing. But here’s the hard truth: most teams aren’t building for scale at all.They’re building for the illusion of scale – and that

I was recently working with a household-name brand – the kind that makes most people nod in admiration just from hearing it. When I met them, their team seemed stacked. They talked the talk. Credentials? No one with less than 5 years experience. Headcount? Very suitable for the project I was brought on to help

I’ve been thinking a lot about speed lately. Because everywhere you turn in the e-com, there’s a frantic obsession with speed: faster site loads, quicker checkout flows, same-day delivery, and “optimize everything now.” But I’ve started to realize that most of the “speed” advice is just surface-level performance theater. And the real speed – what

Many operators are addicted to chasing unicorns. They’re looking for the next 5X ROAS ad, the TikTok that goes viral, the product drop that sells out in 15 minutes. But the truth is, those lightning strikes are rare – and unpredictable. You can’t build a business hoping to get lucky. The brands that win consistently?

I spoke with a friend a couple weeks ago who said, “TikTok is crushing it for us right now, but I’m worried about what happens when it stops working.” He’s not being paranoid. He’s being realistic. The truth is, every acquisition channel in e-commerce will eventually plateau. It doesn’t matter if it’s TikTok, Meta, email, affiliates,

A few weeks ago, I sat in on another marketing meeting where the team was excited about a 0.6% lift in conversions from an A/B test. The control was a “Buy Now” button. The variant? “Shop Now.” They’re calling it a win. As someone who’s building and maintaining the systems under the hood, I get

Most developers in e-commerce are flying blind. They think they’re in control. They deploy features, fix bugs, maybe even watch conversion rates. But when something breaks – a checkout button stops working, a payment fails silently, or load time spikes on mobile – the first question is always the same: “Where’s the log?” And more

You’ve optimized your product photos. You’ve streamlined checkout. You even A/B tested your call-to-action button colors (green won, obviously). But your conversion rate is still underwhelming. And you can’t figure out why. Let me offer you an uncomfortable possibility: It’s not your copy.It’s not your design.It’s your infrastructure. More specifically: it’s a series of invisible technical

If you run (or work with someone who runs) an e-commerce store, you’re probably investing a lot into product pages, ads, and email marketing. But you’re likely neglecting one of the most under-leveraged profit centers sitting right inside your own website: your search bar. Today, I wanted to talk about why most e-commerce search functions are