How we workDelivery model · Senior cross-functional
Most agencies sell process. We bring judgement and a delivery date we'll hold.
Senior-led, commercially grounded, integration-aware. The people you meet at the brief are the people who deliver the project. 600+ projects since 1995, and we know where commerce work tends to come unstuck.
Contents · 7 sections
01 · Commercial understanding
We start with how the business actually operates, before recommending anything technical.
Most agencies position around design, development, features, certifications. The buyers we work with care about something else: operational fit, business-model alignment, internal capability, ownership boundaries, margin impact, total cost of ownership.
We won't recommend a platform until we understand the workflows, the customer types, the fulfilment, and the commercial constraints. Architecture follows how the business actually trades, never the other way round.
And if a brief asks for complexity that won't pay back, we'll say so. Order-takers don't challenge bad decisions. We do.
02 · Discovery
Discovery is a commercial safeguard, not a workshop.
Good discovery prevents expensive mistakes later. We use it to surface dependencies, clarify ownership, agree priorities, and remove uncertainty before anyone writes a line of code. The output is a plan we'll commit to, not a slide deck.
Week 01
Operating model
Workflows, ownership, customer types, fulfilment.
Week 02
Data audit
Every entity, every owner, every contradiction.
Week 03
Integration map
Eight to twenty-four systems, in scope and out.
Week 04
Architecture options
Platform, extension, custom, costs and trade-offs.
Week 05-06
Plan & governance
Timeline, risk register, RACI, decision-makers.
Kickoff────────── 4-6 week structured discovery ──────────Plan signed-off
By the end of week six there's a delivery plan, a risk register, an integration map, and a named owner for every decision the project will need. If discovery surfaces something that breaks the brief, you hear it before build starts, not at month seven.
03 · Senior-led delivery
Senior people stay in the room.
The seniors you meet at the brief stay through to go-live. No bait-and-switch. No quiet handover to juniors at month two.
Decisions are made by people who'll have to live with them: engineers, architects and delivery leads who own the platform long after launch. That's how technical debt stays under control and how projects hold their date.
Role
On commerce
Projects
Speciality
Principal Engineer
22 yrs
41
Adobe Commerce architecture, migration, B2B
Solution Architect
18 yrs
36
PIM, ERP integration, multi-storefront
Delivery Director
24 yrs
58
Project governance, steering, escalation
Lead Engineer · API
14 yrs
27
Order, payment, fulfilment, search
Lead Engineer · Front
12 yrs
24
Hyvä, Storefront, Core Web Vitals
Data Lead
16 yrs
29
Migration, reconciliation, MDM
UX Lead
15 yrs
31
B2B journeys, conversion, account complexity
QA Lead
13 yrs
38
Release engineering, rehearsal, rollback
Anonymised roster · representative of projects shipped 2024-26.
04 · Pragmatism
Proven patterns over unnecessary complexity.
The market is tired of overengineering, excessive customisation, unnecessary rebuilds and trendy architecture decisions that quietly create dependency. We agree.
Use platform capabilities wherever they fit. Extend where the business case is real. Avoid custom sprawl. Maintainability is a commercial outcome, every line of bespoke code is a line someone has to own and pay for, year after year.
We err toward the boring choice. Boring scales, stays online, and keeps your team off the bridge on a Sunday night.
05 · Integrations & data reality
Most commerce failures are operational, not frontend.
The platform is rarely the issue. Everything around it is. ERP, PIM, data quality, fulfilment, pricing, B2B account structures, all moving at different speeds, all owned by different people, all overdue a conversation. Commerce platforms succeed when the operational systems around them line up.
01Critical
ERP / Finance
Order-to-cash, returns, credit, GL posting.
02Critical
OMS · Order routing
Multi-warehouse, click-and-collect, drop-ship.
03Critical
WMS · Warehouse
Pick / pack / despatch, partial fulfilment.
04Critical
PIM · Product data
Attributes, taxonomy, multi-channel publishing.
05Critical
Payments
Gateways, tokenisation, B2B credit accounts.
06High
Tax · Cross-border
VAT, IOSS, US sales tax, duty calculation.
07High
Search
Algolia / Constructor / Coveo · merch rules.
08Medium
CDP / Marketing
Identity, consent, segmentation, send platform.
A typical replatform connects to between eight and twenty-four such systems. We map every one in week one, agree the order they move in, and stage them across the eight to twelve weeks around go-live, never as a single launch gamble.
31 years in complex commerce. Senior people on every project.
We know where commerce projects fail because we've seen each failure mode many times over. The next two sections cover the parts most agencies get wrong.
600+
Projects delivered
Since 1995
Visible
Risks + dependencies
Tracked before launch
9yr
Average client tenure
Top 10 clients
62
Team
Senior-led, employee-owned
06 · Governance & decisions
Decisions get made early, by named people.
Projects spiral when no-one is governing the decisions. We name the owners, set thresholds, and keep a register of every trade-off the project makes. Nothing arrives at steering as a surprise.
Two questions decide who owns a call: how reversible is it, and what does it cost to undo. The matrix on the right is how we delegate.
Cost to undo
Cheap
Cost to undo
Expensive
Reversibility
Reversible
Decided by
Engineer
Decide and ship.
Decided by
Lead Engineer
Decide, log in register.
Reversibility
Irreversible
Decided by
Solution Architect
Decide with delivery lead, log in register.
Decided by
Steering
Escalate. Written trade-off. Approval.
Every irreversible decision is logged. Steering reviews the register at every checkpoint.
07 · Long-term partnership
Launch is the beginning, not the end.
Most agencies treat support as the cheap follow-on. We treat it as the work. Continuous improvement, roadmap, performance, governance, AI readiness. Our average top-ten client has been with us for fourteen years, six of them for more than a decade.
Client · top 10
Years on project
Years
18
16
British Heart Fdn
12
Average top-10 tenure · 9 yrs · 4 clients ≥ 10 years.
Over time the relationship moves from vendor to long-term partner. The team that ran your replatform is the team that runs the roadmap, same people, same operating model, year after year.
The failure map · Industry vs iWeb
Where commerce projects go wrong, and where ours don't.
Eight failure modes account for the vast majority of enterprise replatform overruns. The bars on the left are the industry pattern. The bars on the right are ours, on projects 91 through 98.
Failure mode
Industry · share of overruns
iWeb · last 8
Data migration · reconciliation
62%
4%
Integration timing · ERP/OMS/PIM
54%
6%
Scope creep · undocumented
48%
3%
Performance · stability post-launch
41%
5%
Trading interrupted · revenue loss
36%
0%
Decision drift · no named owner
33%
2%
Senior turnover · post-sale
29%
0%
Governance · steering disconnect
24%
3%
Industry bars · share of overruns attributable to each cause, weighted across published replatform post-mortems · iWeb bars · last 8 projects, internal incident register.