E-commerce business, founded and run
Five years running my own retail business across two channels, including the inventory and order system behind it.
Context
An e-commerce business I founded and ran across two sales channels: a marketplace, which carried the bulk of the volume, and my own storefront.
It began alongside a full-time engineering role and later became the full-time one. I was the engineer and the owner, which meant the software and the business answered to each other directly.
Constraints
Sole engineer, sole owner. Sourcing, pricing, fulfilment and cash all landed on me, alongside building and running the systems.
That is a harder constraint than it sounds. Engineering time was not budgeted against a roadmap; it competed with everything else the business needed that week, and lost whenever it should have.
What I built
An internal inventory and order system that tracked stock across both channels, flagged products for replenishment automatically, and generated sales invoices through an accounting integration.
Deliberately internal and deliberately small. It existed to remove specific recurring work, and its scope was whatever that came to.
Decisions and trade-offs
Operating inside marketplace constraints. Listing rules, fulfilment SLAs and channel-specific stock allocation were not negotiable inputs — the system had to be shaped around them, including the parts I disagreed with. Allocation across two channels sharing one pool of stock was the recurring difficulty.
Building only what paid for itself. Every piece of automation had to save more than it cost to build and keep running. Plenty of things I wanted to build did not clear that bar and were not built. This is the habit I brought back into salaried work most usefully.
Outcome
Peak annual turnover of R1.5m.
Wound down deliberately when margins no longer justified the effort — a decision rather than a failure. It taught me more about trade-offs than any engineering role has, because the feedback was immediate and financial.