Eshtyle

The problem

Multi-vendor commerce is deceptively hard: every vendor wants their own storefront, their own inventory rules and their own payouts, while buyers expect one checkout that just works. In 2021, two of us decided we could build that platform. I was co-founder and lead engineer.

The build

The engineering held up well. Domain-driven design with CQRS for order processing, PostgreSQL tuned properly, ECS Fargate with read replicas and Redis caching for scale, Celery for async order fulfillment and payment webhooks with idempotent task design, OAuth and JWT on the API, and a real observability stack with Prometheus, Grafana and ELK. It was a serious system built by people who cared.

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 couldn't.]
3. [What you took straight into Placewise.]