Engineering insights for US commerce founders.
Practical guides on AI-native commerce, agent-ready selling, custom platform builds, and US commerce compliance: written by the people who ship it.
B2B Marketplaces Are Booming. The Backend Isn't.
US B2B marketplace sales grew 519% since 2021, but order errors kept climbing too. Why the backend, not the storefront, is where marketplaces break.
Why AI Shoppers Bounce at Your On-Site Search Box
AI referral traffic converts 42% better than average, per Adobe. See why most D2C site search still loses that edge — and the fix.
AI Assistants Read Your Product Pages Worst — And That's the Page That Sells
Adobe's 2026 data scores US retail product pages at 66% machine-readable — the lowest of any page type. What to fix on your PDP, in order.
Is Your Store Actually Agent-Ready, or Just Agent-Ready in the Deck?
Anyone can put "agent-ready" on a landing page. Here's the actual technical bar, and a five-minute check you can run before you believe a vendor's claim.
Your AI-built store passed the build. That proves less than you think.
Our own production build reported success while the typechecker found errors on three files. The config had been told to ignore them — and someone had said yes on purpose.
The demand your order data can't show you
Forty people searched for something last week and you don't stock it. That never appears in your sales reports — because those shoppers left.
Headless: what you own and what you're still renting
"Full code ownership" is on every agency site including ours. Here are the three questions that tell you whether it means anything.
What happens to your store when your AI provider goes down?
Not if — providers rate-limit, change models, and expire billing. If AI search is the only search you have, an outage at their end is an outage at yours.
What actually makes a commerce build slow
Not the code. We quote four weeks for a storefront build — and the projects that miss it almost never miss on engineering.
How to tell a real AI demo from a scripted one
The demo always works. Ask for the boring things instead — a query nobody rehearsed, the logs, the bill. Every AI system we've built broke first on something no amount of code review would have found.
Before you let an AI agent touch your store: 5 questions to ask any vendor
An agent that answers questions is a demo. An agent that can create a promotion is a liability with a login. These five questions separate them — and most vendors fail the second one.
Do you need an MCP server? Check this first.
Every Shopify store already exposes one at /api/mcp, with no setup. Before you scope agent access, find out whether you've had it all along.
Do you need to re-platform to get AI search?
Usually not — and if AI search is the only reason you're considering it, buy an app instead. Here's the honest version of a question every vendor answers in their own favour.
Your semantic search isn't broken — your product descriptions are
We shipped vector search and it ranked sweatpants first for "breathable for a hot summer day". The retrieval code was fine. The catalog had nothing to match on.