Peak trading does not forgive fragile checkout flows. During the Midleton Distillery Collection launch we owned every part of a Laravel + React checkout, built on AWS and tightly coupled to headless Shopify. Three lessons mattered most when the drop went live and the order queue spiked 6x above forecast.
Model bottlenecks before writing code
We map every dependency—payment providers, tax services, loyalty logic, inventory systems—and score risk with stakeholders. Laravel services keep the canonical order state while Redis-backed queues fence off each integration so failures stay local. Shopify webhooks can lag briefly without blocking the React checkout because Laravel still reserves inventory asynchronously.
Engineer for gateway failure, not success
Single PSPs are a liability. We implement multi-acquirer routing with idempotent order references, so retries never double-charge. AWS SQS buffers payment events, Parameter Store secures credentials, and GitHub Actions runs contract tests against each PSP sandbox before deploy. During one holiday sale we swapped gateways mid-event because routing rules lived in feature flags, not code branches.
Optimise the front end for clarity and speed
React/Next.js handles tokenisation, address lookup, and wallet prompts locally to avoid blocking the server. We pre-render the checkout shell, lazy-load fraud tooling, and track interaction timings using the same observability stack as the backend (CloudWatch plus custom Laravel metrics). Performance budgets and component contracts stop regressions before QA even sees them.
Rehearse and monitor relentlessly
We run full-funnel rehearsals with realistic traffic using Dockerised load tests, synthetic payment attempts, and red-team drills on inventory accuracy. Alerts tie back to customer impact—authorisation rate, drop-off per step, queue length—so the team reacts to signals that matter. On launch day our only job is to watch dashboards and execute the rollback runbook we have already practiced.
How we help
We’re senior engineers who both design and build checkout systems. If you need a partner who can own architecture, testing discipline, and on-call reality for high-stakes commerce events, we’re ready to lead.