Ecommerce development in Boston
Much of Boston's online commerce is business to business: reagents, consumables, instruments and services sold to labs that buy with a purchase order, not a card. The storefront is the small part. Each customer has negotiated pricing, a university customer wants to order from inside its own procurement system, some products need a quote or a signed form before they ship, and a stock count that drifts overnight becomes a scientist's delayed experiment.
We build commerce around those rules: account-level price lists, quotes that convert to orders, purchase-order checkout with invoicing, and a sync with your ERP where each field has one agreed owner, so two systems never both believe they hold the stock count. Where a customer requires a punchout connection to its procurement platform, we build to that platform's specification. We build it from the integration and payments work we do every day, and on the call we will be specific about how that applies to your store.
Boston's software buyers mostly work in science, medicine, education and money: biotech and pharmaceutical companies in Cambridge and the Seaport, the hospital systems, digital health start-ups, the universities and the companies spun out of them, and the asset managers and insurers downtown. In most of them, software supports something else, an experiment, a patient or a portfolio. The people who commission it are often scientists and clinicians, many of whom write some code themselves and know exactly what they need the data to do. What they want from an engineer is not a new idea. It is the idea they already have, made reliable.
The work follows the science. Biotech labs need instrument output picked up as it lands and linked to the notebook entry that explains it, and internal tools that stay fast on thousands of assay results. Digital health companies need a backend that can read from a hospital's records system, and patient apps that save offline and keep the time each entry was made. Edtech companies selling to universities need platforms that know a teaching assistant from a department administrator. Lab suppliers need commerce that runs on purchase orders and negotiated prices, and the investment firms downtown need internal tools to replace the workbooks that run their operations.
Hiring has its own shape. Built In puts the average software engineer base salary in Boston at about $137,000, and the city's engineers are pulled between big tech offices, well-funded biotech and university spin-outs. The universities keep research talent in good supply. What teams more often lack is someone who has taken a system from a notebook or a prototype to something that runs unattended, is monitored, and survives its author going back to the lab. That gap, between a result that works once and a system that keeps working, is where we are most useful.
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Boston. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included, so questions, reviews and decisions happen live with the engineer who writes the code. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the system keeps running when the people who commissioned it go back to the lab.
We are the right fit for the gap between a result that works once and a system that keeps working: a pipeline, a hospital integration, a patient app, an internal tool. Senior capacity starts within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement, and it can carry you from a funding round or grant to your first engineering hire.
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 Boston teams.
How do you work with teams in Boston?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Boston, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included. We join your Slack, push to your GitHub and track the work in your Linear, so progress shows up where your team already looks. The person on every call is the engineer who writes the code, whether you are a scientist, a clinician or a CTO.
Do you build for Boston's biotech and life sciences companies?+
Yes. The work is usually the software around the science: pipelines that pick up plate reader, sequencer and imaging output as it lands and link it to the notebook entry, internal tools that stay fast on thousands of assay results, and search over protocols and SOPs that always cites the current version. We work alongside your computational scientists, turning what already works in their notebooks into systems that run unattended.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Boston?+
Built In puts the average software engineer base salary in Boston at about $137,000, before bonus 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 it produces.
What do the first two weeks look like?+
You share the context: the code, the data and the problem. Within two days you have a 30-minute call with the engineer who would do the work, and within a week a written plan. Then comes a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800, such as turning one notebook or prototype into something that runs on its own. At the end you have working code in your repository, notes on how it runs, and a clear view of what comes next.
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.