← All work · 2022 – 2023
Core Services at Cart.com
Half a dozen acquired companies, one login, one front door
Cart.com grew by buying companies, and every one of them came with its own login. I led Core Services, the team of six that built a single sign-on across all of them and Brand HQ, the one portal where a brand could see its orders and run its own account.
- 6
- acquired companies behind one login
- 1
- customer portal: Brand HQ
- 6
- people on the team, me included
- 1000s
- of orders an hour from our biggest brands
One company, six front doors
Cart.com set out to give online brands everything behind the storefront in one place: fulfillment, marketplaces, marketing, financing. It got there quickly by acquiring companies that already did each of those things well.
The catch was what a customer saw. A brand using several of Cart’s services had to log in to each one separately, with a different account at every company Cart had bought. To the brand, Cart.com wasn’t one company yet. It was half a dozen.
One login
Core Services fixed the front door first. We built a single identity across every acquired business on Auth0 for customers and Okta for staff (the two are now the same company), so a brand signed in once and was recognized everywhere.
Brand HQ
Behind that login we built Brand HQ, the unified customer portal. It was early days: a brand could see its orders across Cart’s businesses and manage its own account without calling anyone. It was meant to be the foundation that every other service would plug into.
Built for the busy brands
The hard part wasn’t the login page. It was volume. Some of our brands pushed out thousands of orders an hour, and Brand HQ had to keep up with all of them, from every business, as they happened.
So we built it as event-driven microservices on Kafka, running on Google Cloud. Each acquired business published its orders as events, and Brand HQ consumed them at whatever rate they arrived, so the busiest brands couldn’t overwhelm it and a slow system at one business couldn’t hold up the rest.
My job, as director, was the architecture and the team: six of us, with the systems of half a dozen companies to bring together.