Reviews, integrations and due diligence for retailers whose systems grew faster than the plan for them.
1% to 55% of group turnover through the direct channel I built at World of Books
Retail stacks are rarely designed. They accumulate, one supplier at a time, until nobody can say what a system costs or what would break if it were switched off.
The first job is usually not building anything. It is establishing what is actually there, what it costs and what it earns.
What follows is ordered by payback. The cheapest fix that removes the most pain goes first, regardless of how interesting it is.
If you need a full-time engineering team, this is not that. It is one person working out what should be built before you spend money building it.
Every system, what it costs, who depends on it and what happens when it fails. Usually the first document of its kind the business has had.
Licence fees are the easy part. The expensive part is the hours people spend working around a system, and that is the figure most businesses have never put a number on.
A roadmap sequenced by what it returns and when, not by what is newest. Anything without a clear payback is named as such and left out.
Integrations use real APIs with failure handling and alerting from the start. Nothing that depends on a screen layout staying the same.
Handover notes written for whoever looks after it next, so you are not tied to me.
From £3,250
2 to 3 weeks
For retailers whose stack has grown by accretion and now costs more than it returns.
From £7,150
4 to 8 weeks
For teams rekeying data between systems that were supposed to talk to each other.
From £4,500
2 to 4 weeks
For buyers, investors and owners who need to know what the technology is really worth.
Not quite the right fit? Short pieces of work that answer one question, such as whether a proposal is any good.
Pricing is bespoke to scope. Figures are a starting point, confirmed in writing before work starts.
No pitch, no deck. Twenty minutes, no charge, and I ask what's actually going wrong.
Whether it's worth doing, and whether I'm the right person for it. If I'm not, I usually know who is.
If it goes ahead, I look at the numbers before I have a view on the fix. Scope and a price, agreed before anything starts.
Or email me the detail and you will get a reply the same day.
Zsolt Janos Head of Development, World of Books Read the testimonials “He understands the business, he understands how to communicate the business needs to the development team.”
Secondhand gear only makes money if it is priced right at intake. I built Prism, the platform that values gear from live market prices in 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes, runs intake, inventory and listing, and sells across Shopify, eBay and Reverb from a single stock pool.
A £120m marketplace-dependent business needed its own channel. I moved worldofbooks.com from Magento to a headless Commercetools stack in three months, then scaled it from £100k to £4.7m a month across seven storefronts while growing the technology team to 75 and more.
Tell me what is going on and I will tell you whether it is worth fixing, and whether I am the right person to fix it.