How Compile. works: an eleven-phase commerce build

Understand the business first

No code is written until we understand your business. We audit your stack, model your unit economics, name your real bottlenecks, and produce a written architectural plan with cost projections over five years.

System design before implementation

Senior engineers design the technical architecture: data models, service boundaries, integration patterns, hosting topology, deployment pipeline. Documented for your team to review and approve before a single line is written.

Storefront and admin surfaces

Customer-facing storefront, internal admin tools, key user flows. Design happens after architecture, never before. Every screen is built to perform within the technical constraints we already locked in.

Core platform & data layer

Database schemas, authentication, core APIs, deployment pipelines, observability, testing infrastructure. The engineering substrate everything else stands on. Done right, the rest of the build accelerates.

The customer-facing build

Hydrogen, Liquid, or headless storefront, built against the foundation. Performance budgets enforced. Accessibility audited. SEO instrumented. Lighthouse scores documented and locked.

ERP, WMS, 3PL, finance, ESP

Direct integrations to your operational systems. Webhooks, queues, idempotency, retry logic. Each integration ships with monitoring, error budgets, and a runbook your ops team can use without us.

Security, performance, scale

Security review, performance optimization, scale testing, error-handling pass. Penetration test scoped externally. Every endpoint stress-tested at projected peak traffic.

Quality assurance & load testing

Full regression suite, load testing at projected peak traffic, security review, accessibility audit, browser matrix coverage. We don't ship to production until every category clears.

Data, subscribers, traffic

Customer data, order history, active subscriptions, content, redirects. Migrated with verification at every step. Zero subscriber loss is the standard, not the aspiration.

Cutover with rollback plan

Production launch with a documented cutover sequence, real-time monitoring, and a rollback plan we hope to never execute. Senior engineers on-call for the first 48 hours. No surprises.

Your team owns it from here

Full documentation, architectural walkthrough, codebase tour, runbook training. The brand could leave Compile tomorrow and lose nothing operational. That's the test we build toward.