Ecommerce development in Austin
Austin's direct-to-consumer brands tend to grow up on Shopify and a stack of apps. Each app solved one problem the week it was installed: reviews, subscriptions, bundles, loyalty, a pixel for every ad channel. Two years later the storefront is slow on a phone, the subscription app and the warehouse disagree about stock, and a product drop stalls the checkout at exactly the moment the marketing worked.
We start by measuring what each script and app costs the storefront and what it actually does, then remove or replace the ones that are not earning their place. Stock is reconciled between the store, the subscription system and the warehouse through one integration with retries and a record of every change, so an oversell becomes rare rather than weekly. The checkout is load-tested before the drop, not during it. Where the platform runs out, we build the custom pieces, such as a headless storefront, a bundling engine or a wholesale portal, from the integration and payments work we do every day.
The city's centre of gravity is enterprise SaaS and consumer fintech, and both bring the same backend problem early: multi-tenancy that was bolted on after the first enterprise deal, and a permissions model that started as a role column. Then the large customer asks for custom roles and SSO, the board asks for usage-based pricing, and the schema was built for neither. Unpicking that while the product keeps selling is most of what an Austin engagement looks like in the first month. On the fintech side the same pressure lands on the mobile app and the ledger: transfers that must never send twice, and balances that have to match what finance sees.
Austin has also been a hardware and semiconductor town for decades. The fabs and equipment suppliers produce tool telemetry, inspection images and test results in volumes most software companies never see, and the hardware start-ups around them reach the point where a board works on the bench and a pilot customer wants to see its data. Their engineers are process, yield and firmware specialists. The software around the hardware, from the device API and the dashboard to the pipeline that turns readings into something a customer can open, is a defined piece of work that suits an outside team.
Then there is timing. Austin has an unusual density of Series A and B product companies, and they tend to raise, hire aggressively for two quarters, then freeze. A mid-level engineer costs around $145,000 base before equity and benefits, and the platform or infrastructure hire is usually the one that waits longest. We are frequently the answer to "we have the roadmap and the budget, but the req is frozen until next quarter", because an engagement is an invoice rather than a headcount. It starts with a fixed-price two-week piece, and it can grow into an embedded engineer for as long as the roadmap needs one.
We move our working day for Texas. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time, so stand-up, code review and the design conversation happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The code lives in your repositories from the first commit, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so whoever you hire next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when the roadmap is ready and the req is frozen. A defined piece of work, such as a permissions model, a device backend or a cloud setup brought under control, starts with a fixed-price two-week piece. Senior capacity arrives within days, and agencies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
The ERP updates overnight, the store sells all day, and by morning the two do not match. We build the sync as a queue with retries and reconciliation, decide which system wins for each field, and alert on drift before a customer buys stock you do not have.
Or checkout slows until people give up. We cache what can be cached at the edge, keep live stock checks off the browsing path, load-test the shape of a real launch rather than a steady trickle, and queue anything that cannot scale.
Bundles, B2B price lists, subscriptions, delivery rules by postcode. We build it as a custom Shopify app or with Shopify Functions and checkout extensions so it survives platform updates, or tell you when you have outgrown the theme altogether.
Payment webhooks can arrive twice, late or out of order, and the handler trusts every one. We make order state follow the provider's record, process Stripe and Razorpay events idempotently, and reconcile daily so a mismatch is a report, not a complaint.
An hourly sync with a third-party system reachable only through its API, with values normalised at the boundary so unchanged records stop looking changed.
Read the write-up →Asked by Austin teams.
How do you work with teams in Austin?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Texas, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in that window. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code.
Why do Austin product companies come to you?+
Austin has an unusual density of Series A and B product companies with a strong front-end team and no infrastructure hire yet. That is precisely the seat we fill: the multi-tenant backend, the permissions model, the cloud setup and the deploys that nobody senior owns. It is why more of our US enquiries come from Texas than from the coasts. We build it in your codebase, alongside the team you already have.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Austin?+
A mid-level software engineer in Austin earns around $145,000 base before equity and benefits. Our published rate is $35/hour, or $5,400 a month for an embedded engineer, with a $5,000 minimum. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
Our req is frozen until next quarter. Can you cover the gap?+
Yes. It is a common Austin situation, and a good fit for an engagement, because an invoice is not a headcount. The roadmap keeps moving while the req waits. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or embed an engineer at $5,400 a month. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so when your hire does start, they inherit work they can read and extend.
Have you built a store like ours?+
We build stores from the parts of commerce that usually go wrong, and those are what we work on every day: syncing with a third-party system that only speaks through its API, handling webhooks that arrive twice, and background jobs that must not lose or repeat work. On a call we will walk you through how that applies to your store.
Shopify, headless, or fully custom?+
Start with Shopify if a theme and a few apps cover you; that is cheaper than anything we would build. Go headless when the storefront must do things a theme cannot, or share a front end with other products. Build on Medusa or commercetools when the catalogue, pricing or order flow is genuinely unusual. Most stores never need the third option, and we will say so.
Can you connect our ERP or warehouse system?+
Usually, if it has an API or can export files on a schedule. We start by agreeing which system owns each field, such as stock, price and order status, because most sync bugs come from two systems both believing they are the source of truth. Then we build the sync with retries, a log of every change, and a daily reconciliation report.
Which payment providers do you work with?+
Stripe, Razorpay, and Shopify Payments when the store runs on Shopify. Choose the one that suits your markets and fees; we earn nothing from any of them. The work that matters is the same for all three: treat the provider as the record of what was paid, handle every webhook idempotently, and test refunds and partial captures, not only the happy path.
How do you prepare for a sale or a launch?+
We load-test the whole journey, from landing page to paid order, at the traffic you expect and beyond it. We find what breaks first, which is usually a third-party script, an uncached page or the stock check, and fix it before the day. During the sale itself, the engineer who did that work is watching the dashboards with you.