I've worked at an online retailer which uses custom code for both warehouse operations as well as corporate operations, similar size as you. The dev team grew o

I've worked at an online retailer which uses custom code for both warehouse operations as well as corporate operations, similar size as you. The dev team grew over time, but was on the order of 10 people. You absolutely can attract talented developers; this company preferred to hire very experienced people, and that translated into minimal management. (Which also created a high level of ownership by the devs, because they can proactively fix what needs to be fixed and directly add/fix what people/users are complaining about.) They also used a functional language, which tended to limit the pool of available people to people who were capable of quickly coming up to speed. Even after you have something working, you'll probably end up having to do a fair amount of development just to "stay in place", since the needs of the business are (presumably) constantly changing. Sometimes this can take longer than you'd like. But the advantage is that you get exactly what you want. If you're struggling with your current software, it seems reasonable to write your own. You might want to start with writing just the most frustrating part, and then the next frustrating part, etc., rather than trying to implement the whole thing. Especially at the beginning it makes the project smaller, lower risk and you get more successes along the way. And if it doesn't go well, you'll find that out earlier.