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He did an AMA of sorts in the Discord Server a few days after the "launch" mostly a sob story about how it "was all his fault" and how he felt bad everyone was

by d33lio 6y ago

He did an AMA of sorts in the Discord Server a few days after the "launch" mostly a sob story about how it "was all his fault" and how he felt bad everyone was let down. No mention of a number of the systemic or toxic issues mentioned in this article. The Discord Server has since been deleted. I can attest to the beta seeming like something I'd expect from a college kid and a few friends after a hackathon, definitely not something you hired a "team" to work on. I'm curious why anyone else joined the team in late 2019 other than to attach themselves to a "cool and trendy" startup mess. It should also be mentioned that his personal twitter has been scrubbed.

madaxe_again 6y ago
e-commerce is ridiculously hard - I say that as someone who built a company and an e-commerce platform. It looks pretty straightforward on the surface, but when you start getting into discounts, into merchandising, into shipping and volumetric calculations, into tax calculation and distribution centre section, into CRM, into despatch management, into refunds and exchanges, into internationalisation, into segmentation, into all of the myriad intricacies and business rules that have to work every time, in every weird scenario, at scale, with five nines of uptime, you are deep in a world of hurt. It’s hard to do it properly. I mean, we somehow managed, but we managed to do everything else wrong.
- Axsuul 6y ago
  Interesting! Can I ask what your platform is?
  - madaxe_again 6y ago
    Sure. Was - both my business, and their platform. I left after ten years 4 years ago. Since then, it seems the platform has taken a back seat. The resource with the most info that I can find is a review over at https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-reviews https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-re... . No idea if they ever did the planned admin console rewrite. It was built in flex way back when, because reasons - mostly security sandbox for sensitive data that kept it away from potentially contaminated admin browsers.

by d33lio 6y ago

madaxe_again 6y ago

e-commerce is ridiculously hard - I say that as someone who built a company and an e-commerce platform. It looks pretty straightforward on the surface, but when you start getting into discounts, into merchandising, into shipping and volumetric calculations, into tax calculation and distribution centre section, into CRM, into despatch management, into refunds and exchanges, into internationalisation, into segmentation, into all of the myriad intricacies and business rules that have to work every time, in every weird scenario, at scale, with five nines of uptime, you are deep in a world of hurt. It’s hard to do it properly. I mean, we somehow managed, but we managed to do everything else wrong.

Axsuul 6y ago
Interesting! Can I ask what your platform is?
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  Sure. Was - both my business, and their platform. I left after ten years 4 years ago. Since then, it seems the platform has taken a back seat. The resource with the most info that I can find is a review over at https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-reviews https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-re... . No idea if they ever did the planned admin console rewrite. It was built in flex way back when, because reasons - mostly security sandbox for sensitive data that kept it away from potentially contaminated admin browsers.