A polished store app failed where orders and stock mattered
A beauty brand doing about $2 million a year online paid $40,000 for a custom , but the core stock and order systems were broken. Forty customers were charged for products that had already been out of stock for hours. The site looked polished from the outside, and the checkout flow seemed to work well, but the storefront was not properly syncing with the warehouse.
Product data loaded when a page opened, then stayed cached without being checked again or refreshed. Order processing was also more complex than needed. Each order triggered a webhook, which called an , which called another , which then wrote to the database.
If any step failed quietly, there was no retry and nothing was logged. The customer was charged, but the team never received the order.
Key points
- A $40,000 custom build still failed at basic stock and order handling.
- Out-of-stock products kept appearing as available because was not synced with the warehouse.
- Product data stayed cached and was not refreshed after page load.
- The order flow had too many steps, creating more places for failure.
- There was no retry or logged record when part of the order process failed.