Handling 100k+ seasonal orders without paying for peak all year
A fulfilment service that brings paper orders and Shopify orders together and sends them to an external fulfilment system, coping with a huge annual spike and a quiet rest of the year.
- Orders in a few weeks
- 100k+
- Client
- Annual European campaign
The problem
An annual European campaign takes orders in two ways: on paper, and online through Shopify. Both need to reach an external fulfilment provider in a form it can process. For a few weeks each year that means hundreds of thousands of orders. The rest of the year it is a much smaller flow.
What made it hard
- Handling the peak without paying for peak-sized infrastructure all year.
- Making sure no order is lost or sent twice.
- Getting paper orders into the same flow reliably.
What I built
I built most of the fulfilment service that combines the paper order exports with Shopify orders and passes them on. Exports run on a schedule that changes with the time of year: monthly or weekly when things are quiet, and during the campaign a batch goes out each time a set number of orders has come in. The work is processed in batches by queue workers on Google Cloud Platform.
Where it is now
It handles the seasonal spike without a hitch each year. I still maintain it, working through a client.
Facing something similar?
Send me a short outline. It does not need to be a finished specification, and I reply within one working day.