Vibe coding for CEOs in e-commerce.
You run a store or a brand, and the platform does everything except the thing your margin depends on this quarter. The tension is that the CEO's tool goes in front of shoppers and connects to live orders on the same day, and there is nobody in the building to tell you it should not.
What is true about software in e-commerce before you write a prompt.
E-commerce executives have a platform that does most things and a long list of things it does not. Vibe coding fills the list: the returns portal, the wholesale order form, the inventory view, the promotion tool. Every one of them touches orders, customers and money, and every one of them is visible to shoppers or connected to the systems that serve them.
Never store card data yourself
Payment details go through the payment provider and nowhere else. A tool that touches a card number, even briefly, brings PCI obligations the company does not want. The AI will happily build a card form. Do not let it.
Orders and inventory must agree
A tool that updates stock in one place and not the other oversells. A tool that changes an order without telling the platform breaks fulfilment. Integrations need to be two-way and idempotent, or read-only.
Traffic arrives all at once
A promotion tool or a returns page that worked in testing will be hit by thousands on launch day or Black Friday. Hosting, caching and rate limits are part of the build, not an afterthought.
Customer data is personal data
Names, addresses, order history and email. Privacy law applies, deletion requests must be honoured, and marketing consent is a record you have to keep.
What a CEO in e-commerce builds first.
01The wholesale order desk
Retail buyers want net terms, tiered pricing and a reorder form your platform's checkout cannot show. You build it against the platform API, and invoices now originate outside the accounting sync.
02The margin dashboard by SKU
Landed cost, ad spend, returns and shipping per product, joined from the platform, the ad accounts and the 3PL. It is the report that changes what you buy next, so its arithmetic has to be right.
03The promotion you want live by Friday
A bundle builder, a gift with purchase or a limited drop the platform's discount engine cannot do. It runs on your biggest traffic day, and every discount it applies must reconcile with the order it creates.
CEOs in every industry tend to build the same four things. The CEO page has that list.
The discount tool creates orders the platform disagrees with
Your promotion tool applies the discount on your page and then creates the order through the API. On launch day a retry creates it twice, and inventory is decremented twice for a thousand orders. Customer service spends the week cancelling duplicates, the 3PL ships some of them, and the campaign you built to protect margin costs more than the platform app would have.
The pattern underneath is the one every CEO hits: you demoed it, a customer bought it, and now the first version, built to look right rather than be right, is what the company sells. Nobody planned the handover because there was never going to be one.
What a safe build in e-commerce usually runs on.
Builds usually sit next to Shopify, BigCommerce or a similar platform, connected through the platform's API with a scoped key, hosted on Vercel or comparable, with Postgres for anything the platform does not store. Payments stay inside the platform or Stripe. Public pages get caching and rate limiting before launch.
What changes for a CEO in e-commerce.
A CTO in your corner does not slow you down. Before you prompt, you get the ten-minute conversation about what to build and what not to. Before you show it to a customer, someone has read how it stores data and who can see it. When you hand it to a team, it comes with a written account of what it is and how it works. You keep building at CEO speed. The company stops paying for it later.
What CEOs in e-commerce ask.
A CTO who has read e-commerce apps before yours.
Thirty minutes, free, no card. What you built, what is going on with it, whether we can help.
In your corner.