Eshtyle

Eshtyle was a multi-vendor e-commerce platform I co-founded in 2021 as lead engineer. It is no longer running. It is on this page because the lessons from it paid for everything after.

The problem we picked

Multi-vendor commerce is harder than it looks from outside. Every vendor wants their own storefront, their own inventory rules and their own payout schedule, while buyers expect one catalogue and one checkout. Holding both truths in one system is the whole engineering problem.

What we built

The engineering held up. Domain-driven design with CQRS separating the order write path from the read models. PostgreSQL tuned properly, with ECS Fargate, read replicas and Redis caching for sessions and queries. Celery and Redis handled async order fulfilment, email notifications and payment webhooks, all with idempotent task design so a retried webhook could not double-charge anyone. REST APIs behind OAuth 2.0 and JWT with rate limiting and Pydantic validation, and a real observability stack: Prometheus, Grafana and ELK.

It was a serious system, built by people who cared.

Why it is here

Because the retro is the useful part, and a work page with only wins is a brochure. The code was never the reason it wound down.

Lessons

1. [Why it wound down, in your words. The honest version is the valuable one.]
2. [What the business taught you that the codebase could not.]
3. [What you took straight into Placewise.]