Sector IND 05
Ecommerce
Ecommerce work, as Blueharbour does it, is making a store easy to find and quick to buy from: catalogue pages that search engines and answer engines can read, storefront speed measured on real phones, and a checkout that does not lose orders to errors or slow steps. We work on the store you already run, on a hosted platform or headless.
Who this is for
Heads of ecommerce, CTOs and marketing leads at brands, retailers and marketplace operators whose catalogue is too large to fix page by page. It fits when traffic or conversion fell after a redesign or a platform move, or when product pages are slow on phones. It does not fit a company that needs a brand, a product range or its paid advertising run.
Problems you will recognise
- 01
After a platform move, old product URLs return 404 and the search traffic they carried has gone with them.
- 02
Category pages build their product grid in the browser, so a crawler sees filters and an empty grid.
- 03
The product page scores well in a desktop test and is slow on a mid-range phone on mobile data.
- 04
Payment errors at checkout show in the provider's dashboard and never in your own alerts.
European regulation · a condition, not a sector
The regulatory condition
Marketplaces and other online intermediaries serving the EU work under the Digital Services Act, regulation (EU) 2022/2065, which sets duties on illegal content, trader traceability and transparency, scaled by the type and size of the service. This is general information, not legal advice. Whether and how it applies to your company is a question for your own counsel. We build and document the features your counsel asks for.
What we do here
Search and AI visibility
Catalogue pages have to be crawlable, described consistently and measured by page type.
Managed services
A release during a sale is the riskiest one you make, and monitoring has to watch checkout, not only uptime.
AI engineering and automation
Product copy, catalogue tagging and support answers are repeatable work with clear checks.
Web and product engineering
Speed and the links to payments, stock and shipping decide whether a visit becomes an order.
Cloud, data and modernisation
Orders, stock and search data in one place show which pages lose money.
Security and compliance readiness
A store holds customer data at every step, and the data map shows where.
From crawl to purchase, and where visits are lost
The path narrows at every step. The marked stops are where we most often find orders lost to something technical rather than to price or product.
Read as a list
- 01
Crawl. A crawler fetches the page; blocked or broken URLs stop here.Marked: broken URLs
- 02
Index. The page is stored and understood; a page rendered only in the browser can be read as empty.Marked: empty render
- 03
Listing. The result or answer shows the product with a title, price and stock.
- 04
Product page. The page loads on the visitor's phone; a slow main image is the usual cause of delay.Marked: slow LCP
- 05
Cart. The visitor adds the item and sees shipping costs.
- 06
Payment. The payment provider confirms; errors here need to reach your alerts.Marked: silent errors
Industry benchmark: Google treats a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less as good (web.dev, Core Web Vitals).
A first engagement
- 01
Walk the path
Exists afterA record of one product from crawl to paid order, showing what a crawler, a phone and the checkout each see.
- 02
Rank the losses
Exists afterThe points where visits drop, ordered using your own analytics.
- 03
Fix the first one
Exists afterOne change released through review, such as server-rendered category pages or a lighter product image.
- 04
Measure on real devices
Exists afterField data for the changed page type, compared with the same page type before the change.
Questions about this sector
- Do you work on hosted platforms like Shopify as well as headless stores?
- Yes. We work within what your platform allows and say so when a limit of the platform, rather than your setup, is the cause of a problem.
- Will a faster store guarantee more sales?
- No. Speed removes one reason people leave. We measure the change on your own pages and report what moved and what did not.
- Will speed work change how the shop looks?
- Rarely. Most of the gain comes from images, scripts and how pages are delivered. Where a visual change would help, such as reserving space for a banner, we show it to you before it ships.
Name the problem you see this week
Write a few lines about one problem from your own systems. We reply with the questions we would ask first.
An email exchange first, no call needed.