Custom storefronts, marketplaces, and checkout that hold up at scale.
We build the software commerce runs on: custom storefronts and multi-vendor marketplaces, recommendation and dynamic-pricing engines, checkout and payment flows, and the inventory, order, and supply-chain integrations behind them.
Built on your real catalog and order data, fast under a flash-sale spike, engineered so the buying path doesn’t leak revenue at the cart. We build the commerce application and intelligence layer — not someone else’s platform license. Fixed scope, one accountable lead, production in 4–8 weeks, every line of code assigned to you.
Because the buying path is a chain, and revenue leaks at every weak link in it. A storefront that loads in four seconds instead of one quietly sheds buyers before they ever see a product. A checkout with one too many steps hands the cart back to the customer.
A recommendation widget that shows the wrong product leaves the upsell on the table. And the one day all of this is under maximum load — the flash sale, the launch, Black Friday — is the one day the system can least afford to wobble.
The hard part of ecommerce software development was never drawing the screens. It’s the engineering underneath: a catalog and inventory model that stays consistent when stock is moving in real time, a checkout that survives a retried payment without double-charging, a recommendation engine grounded in actual behavior, and an architecture that holds its response time when traffic is ten times normal.
That surrounding system is the entire job — and it’s what decides whether the store converts or just exists.
Ecommerce software development isn’t one product. It’s a set of systems along the buying path, each of which moves a specific number. For each: what it does, the benefit it produces, and a one-line illustration. (Illustrations are examples of how the technology helps, not Silicon Prime client results.)
Builds the buying surface itself — catalog, search, cart, account, and back-office — or a full marketplace where many sellers list, transact, and get paid out through one platform. Benefit — a commerce surface shaped to how you actually sell, instead of a template you fight.
Example: a brand with a complex configurable product gives shoppers a guided builder that off-the-shelf carts can’t model — so the product that used to require a sales call now sells itself online.
Learns from browse and purchase behavior to surface the right product to the right shopper — related items, “complete the look,” and personalized merchandising — instead of showing everyone the same grid. Benefit — higher average order value and conversion from traffic you already have. McKinsey finds personalization typically lifts revenue 5–15% (McKinsey, Nov 2021).
Example: a shopper who added a tent sees the matching footprint and stakes surfaced at the cart — so the order grows by two items the customer genuinely wanted, without a discount.
Adjusts price, promotion, and product placement against demand, inventory, and margin rules — automatically and within the guardrails you set — rather than leaving it to manual spreadsheet updates. Benefit — protected margin and faster response to demand, without constant manual repricing.
Example: slow-moving stock is automatically nudged into a bundle and surfaced higher in search before it ages out — clearing inventory at full intent instead of a last-minute markdown.
Builds a checkout that’s fast, trustworthy, and resilient — fewer steps, clear totals upfront, saved payment, and idempotent payment handling so a retried request never double-charges. Here payments serve the sale (see our fintech software development for payments-as-the-product). Benefit — fewer abandoned carts and more completed orders from the same demand. Baymard finds a large site can gain ~35.26% in conversion through better checkout design (Baymard Institute).
Example: a returning shopper checks out in two taps with saved details and a total shown before the final step — so the cart that used to stall on a surprise shipping cost actually closes.
Wires the store to your ERP, OMS, WMS, and fulfillment so stock counts, orders, and shipments stay consistent across every channel in near real time — instead of overselling something that’s already gone. Benefit — fewer oversells and cancellations, and a single accurate view of stock across channels.
Example: the last unit sold in-store updates the website’s count before the next online shopper can buy it — so the order that would have been cancelled and refunded never gets taken.
Adds a shopping and post-purchase assistant — answering product questions, guiding selection, and handling returns, reorders, and order status from live catalog and order data — built as our conversational AI development work. Benefit — more guided conversions and lower support load on routine post-purchase requests.
Example: a customer reschedules a delivery or starts a return inside the chat at midnight instead of calling — resolving in seconds what would have been a five-minute call and a support ticket.
The scope below is the commerce application and intelligence layer — the storefront, marketplace, recommendation, pricing, checkout, and integration software that runs on top of your platform, payment processors, and back-office systems. We build custom and integrate with what you run; we don’t resell a platform license as our own product.
Catalog, search, cart, account, and back-office — built to your selling model — including full multi-vendor marketplaces with seller onboarding, listings, transactions, and payouts. This is the surface we’ve built end to end before, at marketplace scale.
Decoupled storefronts for speed and flexibility, and integration with the commerce platform you already run (and the systems around it) through clean, versioned APIs — so the front end can move fast without re-platforming the whole stack.
The machine-learning models behind product recommendations, personalized merchandising, and relevant search — trained and validated on your own behavioral and catalog data so the suggestions are grounded in what shoppers actually do, not a generic widget.
Rule-and-model-driven pricing, bundling, and promotion logic that responds to demand, inventory, and margin within the guardrails you set — built to protect margin, not just chase volume.
A fast, resilient checkout with idempotent payment handling, plus the order-management and reconciliation logic behind it, wired to your processors. Payments here serve the sale; for payments-as-the-product (rails, fraud, decisioning) see our fintech software development.
Real-time-enough sync between the store and your ERP, OMS, WMS, and fulfillment partners, so stock, orders, and shipments stay consistent across every channel and overselling stops.
The architecture and performance-optimization work that keeps the store fast and stable under a flash-sale or seasonal-peak spike — load-tested against your real traffic shape before the event, not during it.
What you get when you hire us — all assigned to you
The same delivery model behind all our work, tuned for a revenue-critical commerce system — one accountable lead, fixed scope, no handoffs to account managers.
Scope the use case and the metric it targets — conversion, AOV, cart abandonment, page-load time, oversell rate — and confirm the catalog, order, inventory, and platform constraints it lives within. Run as our AI readiness assessment where personalization or pricing models are in scope, with the honest “this one isn’t worth building yet” call included.
Output: a ranked plan & the metric we’ll be judged on
Connect to your platform, payment processors, ERP/OMS/WMS, and systems of record through governed, scoped integrations, with order and inventory reconciliation built in from the start.
Output: a trusted, consistent commerce data foundation
Develop the storefront, marketplace, or engine in your own cloud environment, and where models are involved, train and validate them against your historical data — with idempotent checkout and a load profile in mind from the first commit.
Output: a working system tested on your real data and traffic
Ship behind a staged rollout, load-test against your real peak shape, prove the metric moves, and train your team to operate, retrain, and extend it.
Output: a production system & a team that owns it
Most engagements reach production in 4–8 weeks, payment is tied to the ROI we agreed at kickoff, and full work-for-hire IP assignment is signed before we start.
Ecommerce is a domain where our deepest proof is the thing itself. We don’t retell a generic portfolio with ecommerce words — here is the in-domain marketplace we shipped and proved in production.
We built YardClub — a contractor-to-contractor marketplace for heavy construction equipment, the “Airbnb for construction” — end to end: the storefront and listings, the multi-vendor transaction surface, and the payment and reconciliation infrastructure that made the sales actually clear.
That marketplace processed more than $120 million in transactions before YardClub was acquired by Caterpillar in 2017. It is the same marketplace, storefront, and commerce-transaction engineering this page describes — listings, the buying path, money movement in service of the sale — shipped and proven in production, not a portfolio mockup.
The peak-reliability bar comes from the same place every system we ship is held to. Over four years we moved BJ’s Restaurants, a 200+ location operation whose software is critical to daily operations, from biweekly releases to twice-a-week shipping with zero critical defects — through evals before release, staged rollout, and continuous production monitoring. Different industry, but exactly the “stay fast, never break the thing revenue depends on” standard a checkout flow or a Black Friday storefront has to meet.
Silicon Prime is a Stanford-rooted Responsible AI lab, founded in 2011, run by founder Kelvin Tran — 20+ years of production engineering, including multimillion-dollar systems for one of the world’s largest manufacturers, and personally accountable for every engagement. If your build is a genuine stretch for what we’ve shipped, we’ll tell you, scope a contained pilot to prove it before you commit, and put the accountability in writing.
We’ve shipped a marketplace to acquisition. The storefront, listings, and transaction infrastructure behind YardClub’s $120M+ in volume and its Caterpillar acquisition is first-party, in-domain commerce proof — not a generic SaaS portfolio retold with ecommerce words.
Built for the day it’s under load. In commerce, the architecture, the checkout’s resilience, and the page-load budget are the product on your highest-revenue day. We engineer for peak and load-test against your real traffic shape before the event, through our performance-optimization practice.
Models grounded in your data. Recommendation and pricing models are trained and validated on your own behavioral and catalog data before they go live — so they lift real orders, rather than showing a plausible-looking widget that doesn’t convert.
Founder-led, built to transfer. One accountable lead, not a relay of account managers; the storefront, models, and integrations are assigned to you, with your team trained to run and extend them when we step back.
What teams want to know before they commit to building ecommerce software.
Genuine, in-domain experience. We built YardClub — a contractor-to-contractor marketplace — end to end, including its storefront, listings, multi-vendor transaction surface, and the payment and reconciliation infrastructure behind it. That marketplace processed $120M+ in transactions before being acquired by Caterpillar in 2017. It’s real marketplace and commerce engineering — the listings, the buying path, and the money movement that serves the sale — not a generic portfolio retold with ecommerce words.
We build custom commerce software and integrate with whatever platform you run — we don’t resell a platform license as our own product. If an off-the-shelf platform fits your model, we’ll integrate cleanly with it (including headless/decoupled storefronts for speed). Where your selling model outgrows the template — complex configurable products, a multi-vendor marketplace, bespoke pricing, deep back-office integration — we build the custom layer that the platform can’t. We scope that honestly: if the platform already does it well, we won’t build it twice.
Yes — that’s our deepest proof. YardClub was a full marketplace: many sellers listing, transacting, and getting paid out through one platform, processing $120M+ before its Caterpillar acquisition. Marketplaces add real complexity over a single store — seller onboarding, listing management, split payments and payouts, and trust-and-safety — and that complexity is exactly the engineering we’ve shipped end to end before.
By surfacing the right product to the right shopper from their real behavior, rather than showing everyone the same grid. McKinsey finds personalization typically lifts revenue 5–15%, with faster-growing companies generating 40% more of their revenue from it (McKinsey, November 2021). We train and validate the models on your own behavioral and catalog data and measure the lift against a baseline set at kickoff — so the engine earns its place by moving average order value and conversion, not by looking smart.
By engineering for it and load-testing against your real traffic shape before the event, not during it. The architecture is built so response time holds when traffic is many times normal, the checkout is resilient to retries and partial failures, and the inventory model stays consistent under concurrent buying. We treat the highest-revenue day as the design target through our performance-optimization work — because that’s the day the system can least afford to wobble.
The engineering rigor is shared, but the lens is different. On this page, payments serve commerce — checkout, order management, and the reconciliation that makes a sale clear; the product is the store and the buying path. Our fintech software development page is for companies where payments are the product — payment rails, fraud detection, real-time decisioning, and regulatory reporting. If you’re selling things, you’re here; if you’re building financial infrastructure, that page fits better. We built both surfaces of YardClub, which is why we can speak to either.
The software runs in your own cloud environment under your access controls; integrations to your platform, processors, and back-office systems are scoped, permissioned, and audit-logged; and every engagement starts with an NDA and a security review. For checkout and payment paths we engineer toward standards like PCI-DSS rather than bolting controls on at the end, and we document every data path so your team can verify rather than trust.
You do — completely. The storefront, marketplace, models, checkout logic, and integrations transfer under full work-for-hire IP assignment signed at kickoff, and your team is trained to operate and extend them. Most engagements reach production in 4–8 weeks under a fixed-scope, ROI-tied model with one accountable lead; build cost depends on scope — our AI development cost guide gives real ranges — and we set the target metric at kickoff so the value is measured against a baseline rather than assumed.
Thirty minutes · No pitch deck
Bring the problem you want to attack — a checkout that’s leaking carts, a recommendation engine that should be lifting AOV, a marketplace you need to stand up, a storefront that buckles on your biggest day — and we’ll tell you honestly whether it’s worth building, what it takes, and what it costs to run.