Build / E-commerce Development
Stores engineered around the transaction path: checkout reliability, speed under load, integrations and the server behind them.
TechSteps builds and repairs e-commerce systems with attention to the transaction path: checkout reliability, page speed under real load, stock and order integrations, and the infrastructure behind the store. A store that loses one percent of checkouts to a timeout has an engineering problem, not a marketing one, and that is the kind of problem this work is aimed at.
What this solves
E-commerce is where every weakness in a web stack becomes measurable. A slow page is not just a poor experience, it is an abandoned basket. A plugin conflict is not an inconvenience, it is orders that never arrive. A server that copes on an ordinary Tuesday can fail on the one day of the year that matters most.
Most stores are built for the catalogue and not for the checkout. The product pages look correct, and the failure modes cluster in the last three steps where the money is.
We work on the parts that determine whether a visit becomes an order, and on the infrastructure that has to hold when traffic arrives all at once.
When people call us
If more than one of these sounds familiar, the underlying cause is often a single issue rather than several separate ones.
Technical scope
Not every engagement includes all of this. The scope is agreed in writing before we start, and anything excluded is named rather than left ambiguous.
How we approach it
Before changing anything, we establish where visits are actually lost. Analytics, server logs and error tracking together usually make the pattern obvious within days.
An intermittent checkout failure costs more than a slow product page. Reliability problems get addressed first because they are directly measurable in orders.
Most e-commerce performance work is deciding precisely what can be cached and ensuring cart, checkout and account responses never are. Getting this wrong shows a customer somebody else's basket.
Slow product listing is frequently a database problem, not a front-end one. We look at query patterns and indexes rather than only compressing images.
Testing the store the week before a campaign, at the traffic level you expect, is far cheaper than discovering the ceiling during the campaign.
Checkout availability and order flow, not just whether the homepage responds. A store can serve pages perfectly while taking no money at all.
What goes wrong
These are the patterns we see most often when we are called in to fix someone else's work, or our own from earlier in our careers.
Cart, checkout and account pages get cached, and customers see stale or, much worse, another customer's data. This is the single most damaging e-commerce caching mistake.
Each plugin adds queries, assets and update risk. Twenty plugins doing small jobs can cost more than the platform itself, and one of them will eventually conflict with checkout.
Two systems both believe they are authoritative. Overselling follows, usually during the busiest period.
A gateway timeout that shows a generic error loses the order and leaves no trace. Failure paths need logging and a route back for the customer.
PHP workers exhaust, requests queue, and the store becomes unavailable at exactly the moment the marketing spend lands.
Questions we actually get asked
Usually. Intermittent checkout failures are commonly a timeout against a payment or shipping API, a PHP worker exhaustion under concurrency, or a plugin conflict that only triggers for a specific combination of cart contents. The path is to add logging around the failure points and wait for it to happen with instrumentation in place, rather than guessing.
Yes for catalogue pages, and it must be applied carefully. Cart, checkout, account and any personalized response have to be excluded explicitly. The performance win comes from the pages most visitors see most often, which is exactly where caching is safe.
Usually. The important part is deciding which system is authoritative for each piece of data and what happens when they disagree, because that is where synchronization projects go wrong. We agree those rules before writing the integration.
Test at the traffic you expect, well before the date. That means load testing the checkout path specifically, sizing PHP workers and database connections for the peak, confirming caching rules, and having a rollback position for any change made close to the event. We also recommend a change freeze in the final days.
Our deepest experience is WooCommerce, and the infrastructure and performance work applies to any store running on infrastructure you control. If you are on a fully hosted platform, our useful contribution is narrower and we will tell you that up front.
Describe the system and what is going wrong with it. A short technical conversation is usually enough for us to tell you whether this is the right work and roughly what it involves.