The Questions We Ask

Every project we take on starts with the same set of questions, asked before anyone builds anything. These are a handful of them. Each one came from something that went wrong on a real site. Find the one that sounds familiar, then ask it about your own.

  1. Episode 1 1:36

    Why did our orders stop when every system said it was running fine?

    Your site wasn’t broken. It was built to pull prices and stock live from another system, usually the ERP or a supplier, and when that system went quiet there was no price, so no basket, so no checkout. The fix is to fetch that data on a schedule, store a copy your side, and agree how long it stays valid.

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  2. Episode 2 1:37

    Why is our invoice out by a few pounds and nobody can explain it?

    Two systems are doing correct arithmetic but rounding in different places, usually around VAT. One stores the ex-VAT price rounded to two decimal places; the other works from the inclusive price and strips VAT at the end. Multiply by a big quantity and the gap appears, different on every order, which is why nobody can pin it down.

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  3. Episode 3 1:17

    Why can't we show one price on our configurable products?

    A configurable product does not have a price; it has a set of rules that produce one once every option is chosen. Three options with five choices each is 125 real prices behind one product page, and the count multiplies with every option you add. The website has to compute the price, not look it up.

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A handful of the questions we ask before we build

There are a few hundred more. Discovery asks all of them in a day and gives you a straight answer on what’s sound and what it would take to fix. If one of these episodes described your site, start there.

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