Stories of systems we have built: what the problem was, what we did and what came out of it. Real numbers, client names changed.
The most common fear of anyone running a working shop: „we will move it and lose our Google traffic”. That fear is justified — but not because migrations damage rankings by nature. What does the damage is everything people forget to bring along.
The median time to answer a complaint fell from four hours to fifteen minutes. Not because anybody started typing faster — because they stopped searching.
Nine sites, one dashboard, no cookies and no consent banner for statistics. Over the last thirty days: 1,083 human sessions and 854 bot sessions that had to be filtered out — 44% of all traffic.
A booking portal takes a percentage of every booking, indefinitely. Your own system costs a fixed amount regardless of turnover. The whole decision comes down to one calculation you can do on the back of an envelope.
The cost of building comes up in every first conversation. The cost of year two — almost never. And it is year two that decides whether the system was a good decision.
When the same item is sold across six shops on three markets, sooner or later it turns out to be called something slightly different in each. Then somebody tries to build a report out of it.
„How much does a window cost?” is not an enquiry — it is the start of four emails and two phone calls. A configurator has one job: to turn that into a complete set of details you can answer once.
A model would calculate it better. Except that a salesperson who does not understand where a score came from simply stops looking at it — and at that point it does not matter how accurate it was.